cognitive biases Flashcards
What is cognitive bias?
System errors in thinking that affect judgment and decision-making
What are the positive effects of cognitiv biases?
decision making is faster and more efficient
What are the negative effects of cognitive biases?
can lead to serious errors in judgment
What is confirmation bias?
the tendency to seek out information that confirms your beliefs and minimise or ignore information that discount your beliefs
What can confirmation bias lead to?
- Influence how we gather information(prevent objectivity)
- Influence how we recall/interpret information
- Influence decisions and lead to poor /faulty choices
What is the Pygmalion theory?
a psychological phenomenon in which high expectations lead to improved performance and low expectations lead to worse performance
What are the 4 factors teachers tend to do(pygmelion effect)?
- Climate factor (nicer to the kids they have expectations for)
- Input factor(teach more to the prominent kids)
- Opportunity factor(they call on them more often, help, and let them speak longer)
- Feedback factor(praises the good kids/accept a low-quality answer from bad students)
What is belief perseverance error?
- the tendency to retain our beliefs despite facing evidence to the contrary
- confirmation bias results in belief perseverance effect
- stereotypes
- leads to more extreme evaluations
- prejudical behavior
What is overconfidence?
The tendency to be more confident than correct
When attempting to explain the behaviour of others, people tend to?
Underestimate(the role of situational factors)
Overestimate(the role of dispositional factors)
What is Dispositional/Internal
Attributions?
Attributing behaviour to traits,
attitudes, and enduring internal states
What is Situational/ExternalAttributions?
Attributing behaviour to aspects of the environment, including other people
Why do we make attributions?
Accurate attributions can simplify our world by helping us to:
1. Explain the causes
of behaviour and
outcomes
2. Predict the future
behaviour of others
3. Respond to social
situations in an
appropriate way
What are Fundamental Attribution Errors?
1.Tendency to attribute behaviour
of others to dispositional factors
2. Tendency to ignore situational
determinants of other’s behaviour
What is the jones & haris(1967) study?
A study in which someone wrote a pro/contra essay about Castro and ppl had to guess if the person was actually pro/contra Castro.
What Causes the FAE?
The FAE may occur because people tend to automatically make dispositional attributions,
then only later use situational information to discount/correct their initial evaluation
Who uses FAE less and more?
Less: Asians/indians(Explained behaviours in terms of social roles, obligations, and
situational factors. Focused on contextual factors)
more: Americans( Explained behaviours in terms of dispositional traits. Focused on individual attributes
What is actor-observer bias?
tendency to attribute other’s behaviour
to dispositional factors
Tendency to attribute own behaviour
to situational factors
What are actors focused on? What are observers focused on?(actor-observer bias)
Actors
Attention focused on the situation,
hence focus on situational factors
Observers
Attention focused on the individual,
hence focus on dispositional factors
What is Self-Serving Attributional Bias?
When we succeed…
Tendency to attribute our successes
to internal traits and talents
When we fail…
Tendency to attribute our failures to
external factors beyond our control
Why does it occur(Self -Serving Attributional Bias)?
Helps protect our self esteem
What is Hindsight Bias?
tendency to assume one knew all along that a given outcome was likely
What is the false-consensus effect?
The tendency to overestimate how much others agree with our beliefs, attitudes, values, and behaviour.
This can lead people to overvalue the
correctness of their own opinions
If you like a certain type of food, you overestimate how many others also like that type of food if you did poorly on an exam, you overestimate how many of your classmates also did poorly on the exam
