Chapter 3 Flashcards
Priming
Environmental cues can influence someone’s behavior, attitudes, and opinions.
Intuition
Things which are perceived subconsciously and can contain fact (ex: blind person guessing what they see) and prejudice (ex: employer judging an applicant by their race or accent).
Automatic processing
System 1, automatic, impulsive thought.
Controlled processing
System 2, reflective, deliberate, and conscious thought.
Overconfidence
The tendency to believe one is right and express things with confidence even if they are wrong or lack enough understanding to genuinely be that confident.
Confirmation bias
The tendency to prefer and agree with sources that confirm pre-existing beliefs.
Heuristics
A mental short-cut or rule of thumb that people use to make quick decisions with little effort.
Representative Heuristics
Heuristics that categorize ideas about people, places, or things, based on how well that people place or thing represents their idea of it. For example, a young white atheist male who abuses drugs is more representative of people who enjoy heavy metal than of people who enjoy pop or country.
Availability Heuristics
We make assumptions based on the names and ideas that are most available for recall. For example, between Iraq and Tanzania we’re more likely to choose Iraq because we’ve heard it more often.
Counterfactual thinking
Imagining what might have been can influence one’s feelings about actual events. (Ex: The feelings of someone who barely got up to a B in a class, vs someone who got a high B but narrowly missed getting an A-).
Belief perseverance
People will continue to believe a false belief even after it has been proven wrong to them, because they themselves have argued for the false belief in the past.
Misattribution
Attributing people’s behavior incorrectly to certain beliefs and intentions.
Attribution theory
The study of how we attribute people’s behavior (as either internal nor external) based on cues.
Dispositional (attribution)
The assumption that a behavior is internally caused (a preference or decision).
Situational (Misattribution)
The assumption that a behavior is externally caused (an adaptation).
Fundamental attribution error
People are more likely to assume someone is acting of their own volition rather than in response to circumstances, even if they created those circumstances.
Self-fulfilling prophecy
If people believe something is more likely, they inadvertently cause that effect with their behavior. For example, this occurs with the stock market.
