Cognitive Flashcards
Confirmation Bias
(Nickerson, 1998)
The tendency to seek out or assign a greater weight to evidence that confirms their existing beliefs over evidence that challenges them.
Systems of Thinking and the Influence of Cognitive Biases
(Kahneman, 2011)
Argues that we have two systems of thinking, or modes of thought. System 1 is fast, intuitive, emotional - enables decision-making without conscious deliberation. System 2 is slower, more analytical/logical, more effortful/energy demanding - but consequentially more resistant to biases and errors.
Cognitive biases and heuristics help to enable faster decision making (Gigerenzer argues that they are an adaptation - as we wouldn’t be able to function in the day to day without the ability to make snap decisions) - but they can also often lead to predictable errors of judgement.
Status Quo/Default Bias
(Kahneman et al., 1991)
The tendency to favour the default state of affairs over making a change, even if the change could be beneficial.
(Johnson & Goldstein, 2003)
A real world example of this is seen in research with organ donation: donation rates are much higher when people are required to opt-out of donating as opposed to opting in.
Sunk-Cost Effect
(Arkes & Blumer, 1985)
The more resources an individual has invested in a given project, the more likely they are to engage in further investment: even when the project is no longer demonstrating success.
Availability Bias
(Tversky & Kahneman, 1973)
The tendency to assess the probability of an event based on the ease with which occurrences of that event can be brought to mind.
(Dubov & Phung, 2015)
Vivid and engaging accounts of a certain outcome have been found to influence one’s assessment of that outcome’s probability.
Cognitive Dissonance
(Festinger et al., 1956)
A state of mental tension that arises when an individual holds two cognitions (i.e. beliefs, ideas, opinions) that are inconsistent with one another. This mental tension produces discomfort, and therefore people seek to reduce it.
(Kuhn et al., 1994)
Jurors who decided their opinion early on were most confident in their decision and the most likely to vote for an extreme verdict, in order to avoid the cognitive dissonance that would result from admitting their initial instinct had been wrong.
Self-Justification
The process by which we minimize our bad decisions and mistakes in order to make it easier for us to cope with them.
(Aronson & Mills, 1959) - (Gerard & Mathewson, 1966)
Participants who undergo a severe initiation rate the group much more favourably than the participants who complete a mild initiation. In order to justify having gone through the difficult initiation, the participants had to convince themselves that the reward (i.e. the group membership) was worth their effort.
Groupthink
(Janis, 1983)
A phenomenon that occurs when members of a group have the same opinion on an issue but know little about it. By interacting with one another, the group mistakenly starts to believe that they understand the issue better and feel more justified in their collective opinion.
(Pruitt, 1971)
Like-minded people discussing a political issue on which they were poorly educated caused the group to become more polarized in relation to their position on that issue.
Growth in Uninformed Mental-Health Practitioners
(Lilienfeld et al., 2003)
The past few decades have seen an immense increase in the demand for mental-health practitioners and, in tandem, the emergence of many counselling-psychology and psychotherapy programmes which focus very little on understanding research and statistics.
(Patihis et al., 2014)
Practitioners with more scientific training have more accurate beliefs around psychological theory - the ability to critically consume and digest scientific research is of utmost importance to good scientific practice.
The Fallibility of Memory
(Offer et al., 2000)
Participants were interviewed at 14 and at 48, and their ability to remember what they had believed at 14 was so greatly influenced by their current opinion of themselves that it was no better than chance. Emphasizes the reconstructive nature of memory.
The Illusion of Explanatory Depth
(Rozenblit & Keil, 2000)
People have a tendency to believe that they understand more than they actually do. People consistently rate their knowledge on a topic lower than they do before they are asked to explain it.
(Parker et al., 2006)
Looked at the experiences of patient AJ who suffers from hyperthymesia: an autobiographical memory of her life. However, this condition hinders AJ’s everyday function in that her memories are regularly playing through her head and impede her focus. This suggests that the human brain has not evolved with the intent to store large amounts of information. Instead, the mind has evolved to retain only the information that is necessary for guiding future decisions, resulting in the knowledge illusion.
