Chapter 8: Thinking Flashcards
Study reasoning, judgements, decision making, and problem-solving
Cognitive psychologists
Focus on maladaptive thought patterns and their implication for emotional well-being
Cognitive psychotherapy
- Dwelling on the negative and discounting the positive
- Guy gets a bad review but gets a promotion = he dwells on the smaller problem, making it seem bigger than it is
- Having one bad grade, the rest of positive feedback doesn’t get considered
Magnification and minimization
(cognitive distortion)
- Viewing negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat
- I failed on this test, so my life will be a failure
- Implies you have a crystal ball and you know your future, when you actually don’t know
Overgeneralization
(cognitive distortion)
- “I feel like an idiot … therefore, I must be one
- Lap of logic
Reasoning from how you feel
(cognitive distortion)
Taking blame for events that are unintended for beyond one’s control
- ex: It’s all my fault this happened
Personalization
(cognitive distortion)
- Imagining (without direct evidence) what someone is thinking
- projecting your fears onto other people
Mind reading
(cognitive distortion)
Drawing an inference from a general premise to a specific conclusion
Deductive reasoning
We tend to judge as true those conclusions with which we agree, assuming it is true because we agree with it
→ attitudes about certain groups, types of people, attitudes about yourself
Confirmation bias
Problem-solver will go from the particular to the general
Inductive reasoning
The tendency to perceive an item only in terms of its most common use
Functional fixedness
A tendency to approach a problem in a way that has worked in the past, even when it’s not working in the present.
Mental sets
A problem-solving technique that involves breaking down a goal into smaller, more manageable steps:
Means-end analysis
- Incubation / taking a break
- Sleep on it for a bit and you’ll feel better
Facilitation
Yvette is trying to get accustomed to a new version of a software program that she has used for years. The program includes new ways of accomplishing certain tasks more quickly and efficiently, but Yvette sticks with her old methods when working on these tasks. Yvette’s thinking is an example of
A mental set
When people assume that they should use all the numerical information provided in a problem statement they often
Led astray by irrelevant information
Research on water jar problems helped scientists to recognize a common barrier to effective problem solving. This barrier was …
Mental set
Herbert Simon’s research on decision making found that when making decisions, people generally are…
Reliant on simple strategies that often lead to irrational decisions
Erin attends a boarding school in the countryside. Over a long weekend, 9 of her 50 classmates leave the school and document their outings on social media, while Erin and the rest of her classmates stay in the dorms. When classes resume next week, Erin thinks to herself, “My life stinks! Everyone seems to go out except for me.” This scenario is an example of…
The availability heuristic
After a week’s long shark attack TV series in Australia, Elena found that Australian citizens reported greater fears of dying from a shark attack than from heart disease, despite the fact that heart disease kills 50 times more people per year than shark attacks. This scenario is best described as an example of…
The availability heuristic
As a college student, Maria had several negative interactions with fans of her school’s sports rivals, the Dragons. Since then, she believed that all Dragons fans were rude and disrespectful. Recently, Maria met a new co-worker who happened to be a Dragons fan. While she initially avoided interactions with her new co-worker due to her beliefs about Dragons fans, over time she found him to be friendly, approachable, and compassionate. In this scenario, maria;s initial impression of her coworker illustrates…
The representativeness heuristic
What does NOT contribute to the gambler’s fallacy?
The belief that each occurrence of an event is independent
What would help a person avoid the gambler’s fallacy?
The belief that each incidence of an event is independent
The gambler’s fallacy is the belief that the odds of a chance event …
Increase if the event has not occurred recently
Which mental heuristic contributes to the gambler’s fallacy?
The representativeness heuristic
A sign that children are applying grammatical rules and becoming more verbally sophisticated.
Overregularization
When little Brianna tells her father, “I maked cookies with Mommy today,”
A language development phenomenon that occurs when a child uses a single word to refer to multiple objects or concepts
Overextension
When little Tommy sees a tiger in a storybook, he points at it and exclaims “Kitty!”
Two documented advantages of being raised bilingual are increases in …
Social skills and executive control
A psychological concept that refers to the value of something based on a person’s needs and desires, rather than the object’s inherent value:
Subjective value
Marc buys lottery tickets every week even though he knows the expected value of each $5 ticket is less than one cent.
A cognitive bias that causes people to continue a course of action despite it being irrational or no longer beneficial. This is because people feel that their time, energy, or money would be wasted if they quit.
The sunk cost fallacy
