Chapter 2 Flashcards
Critical Thinking
Antidote
A remedy to prevent or counteract an adverse effect.
Assimilation Bias
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.
Availability Heuristic
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.
Barnum effect
A phenomenon that refers to people’s willingness to accept uncritically the validity of Barnum statements.
Barnum Statement
Any generic one-size-fits-all description or interpretation about a particular individual that is true of practically all human beings.
Belief Perseverance Effect
The tendency to cling stubbornly to one’s beliefs, even in the face of contradictory or disconfirming evidence.
Bias
A prejudcial inclination or predisposition that inhibits, deters, or prevents impartial judgement.
Bidirectional Causation
A mutual, reciprocal relationship between two variables wherein each is both a cause and an effect of the other.
Cognitive Bias
Any systematic error in attribution that derives from limits that are inherent in people’s cognitive abilities to process information.
Continuous Variable
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.
Dichotomous Variable
Any variabke that can be placed inti either two discrete and mutually exclusive categories.
Fundamental Attribution Error
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
Heuristic
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.
Metathinking
The act of thinking about thinking; engaging in a critical analysis anf evaluation of the thinking process.
Metathoughts
Thoughts about thought, which involve pronciples of critical thinking.
Motivational Bias
Any systematic error in attribution that derives from people’s effort to satisfy their own personal needs.
Naturalistic Fallacy
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.
Parataxic Reasoning
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.
Post hoc error
The logical error that because event B follows event A, then B must be caused by A.
Representativeness Bias
Any condition in which the representativeness heuristic produces systematic errors in thinking or information processing.
Representativeness Heuristic
A cognitive strategy for quickly estimating the probability that a given instance is a member of a particular category.
Schema
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.
Self-fullfilling-prophecy
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.
Unidirectional Causation
A relationship between two variables wherein one is the cause and the other is the effect.
