Chapter 2

Question 1

Antidote

Answer 1

A remedy to prevent or counteract an adverse effect.

Question 2

Assimilation Bias

Answer 2

The propensity to resolve discrepancies between preexisting schemas and new information in the direction of assmimilation rather than accomodation, even at the expense of distorting the information itself.

Question 3

Availability Heuristic

Answer 3

A cognitive strategy for quickly estimating the frequency, incidence, or probability of a given event based on the ease with which such instances are retrievable from memory.

Question 4

Barnum effect

Answer 4

A phenomenon that refers to people’s willingness to accept uncritically the validity of Barnum statements.

Question 5

Barnum Statement

Answer 5

Any generic one-size-fits-all description or interpretation about a particular individual that is true of practically all human beings.

Question 6

Belief Perseverance Effect

Answer 6

The tendency to cling stubbornly to one’s beliefs, even in the face of contradictory or disconfirming evidence.

Question 7

Bias

Answer 7

A prejudcial inclination or predisposition that inhibits, deters, or prevents impartial judgement.

Question 8

Bidirectional Causation

Answer 8

A mutual, reciprocal relationship between two variables wherein each is both a cause and an effect of the other.

Question 9

Cognitive Bias

Answer 9

Any systematic error in attribution that derives from limits that are inherent in people’s cognitive abilities to process information.

Question 10

Continuous Variable

Answer 10

Any variable that lies along a dimension, range or spectrum rather than a discrete category, that can theoretically take in an infinite number of values and is expressed in terms of quantity, magnitude or degree.

Question 11

Dichotomous Variable

Answer 11

Any variabke that can be placed inti either two discrete and mutually exclusive categories.

Question 12

Fundamental Attribution Error

Answer 12

A bias in attempting to determine the causes of people’s behaviour that involves overestimating the influence of their personality traits, while underestimating the influence of their particular situations; that is, overutilizing internal attributions and unterutilizing external attributions

Question 13

Heuristic

Answer 13

A mental shortcut or rule-of-thumb strategy for problem solving that reduces complex information and time consuming tasks to more simple, rapid, and efficient judgmental operations, particularly in reaching decisions under conditions of uncertainty.

Question 14

Metathinking

Answer 14

The act of thinking about thinking; engaging in a critical analysis anf evaluation of the thinking process.

Question 15

Metathoughts

Answer 15

Thoughts about thought, which involve pronciples of critical thinking.

Question 16

Motivational Bias

Answer 16

Any systematic error in attribution that derives from people’s effort to satisfy their own personal needs.

Question 17

Naturalistic Fallacy

Answer 17

An error in thinking whereby the individual confuses or equates objective descriptions with subjective value judgments, in particular, by defining what is morally good or bad solely in terms of what is statistically frequent or infrequent.

Question 18

Parataxic Reasoning

Answer 18

A kind of “magical thinking”, frequently responsible for superstitious behaviours, in which events that occur close together in time are erroneously construed to be causally linked.

Question 19

Post hoc error

Answer 19

The logical error that because event B follows event A, then B must be caused by A.

Question 20

Representativeness Bias

Answer 20

Any condition in which the representativeness heuristic produces systematic errors in thinking or information processing.

Question 21

Representativeness Heuristic

Answer 21

A cognitive strategy for quickly estimating the probability that a given instance is a member of a particular category.

Question 22

Schema

Answer 22

A cognitive structure or representation that organizes one’s knowledge, new events and future experiences, a general expectation or preconception about a wide range of phenomena.

Question 23

Self-fullfilling-prophecy

Answer 23

A phenomenon wherein people’s attitudes, beliefs, or assumptions about another person (or persons) can, with or without their intent, actually produce the very behaviour that they had initially expected to find.

Question 24

Unidirectional Causation

Answer 24

A relationship between two variables wherein one is the cause and the other is the effect.