Exam #2 Study Guide

Question 1

What is meant by the term “cognitive miser?”

Answer 1

Cognitive miser: A term used to describe people’s reluctance to do much extra thinking.

Question 2

Know what the Stroop test is and be able to describe the Stroop effect.

Answer 2

Stroop test: A standard measure of effortful control over responses, requiring participants to identify the color of a word (which may name a different color).
Stroop effect: In the stroop test, the finding that people have difficulty overriding the automatic tendency to read the word rather than name the ink color.

Question 3

What is the Implicit Associations Test (IAT)?

Answer 3

A computer test that measures the strength of associations between concepts (gay people) and evaluations (good, bad) or stereotypes (athletic, clumsy).

Question 4

How do the IAT and Stroop test demonstrate differences in automatic and deliberate judgments?

Answer 4

The IAT and Stroop test demonstrate that the automatic system is faster at making judgements than the deliberate system. These judgements rely on mental shortcuts and it takes time and effort for the deliberate system to override them.

Question 5

What are schemas and scripts and what do they have to do with the term “priming?”

Answer 5

Schemas: knowledge structures that represent substantial information about a concept, it’s attributes, and it’s relationships to other concepts
Scripts: knowledge structures that define situations and guide behavior
Priming is the activation an idea in someone’s mind so that related ideas are more accessible. Priming relies on schemas and scripts that already exist in someone’s mind in order to influence their behavior in the future, this can happen consciously or unconsciously and in seemingly unrelated contexts.

Question 6

Understand the differences in positive and negative framing (e.g., gain-framed and loss-framed).

Answer 6

Gain-framed appeal: Focuses on how doing something will add to your health
Loss-framed appeal: focuses on how not doing something will subtract from your health

Question 7

Explain the difference between internal/external and stable/unstable attributions.

Answer 7

Internal attributions attribute one’s success or failure to factors within a person (e.g., effort, intelligence), while external attribute one’s success or failure to factors beyond the person, and more to the situation at hand (e.g., luck, task difficulty).
Stable/unstable attributions refer factors that are constant (e.g., ability, task difficulty) and changing (effort, luck).
These four dimensions are used to illustrate attribution theory.
Stable + Internal = Ability
Stable + External = Task Difficulty
Unstable + Internal = Effort
Unstable + External = Luck

Question 8

What is the actor/observer bias?

Answer 8

Actor/Observer Bias: The tendency for actors to make external attributions and observers to make internal attributions.

Question 9

What is the “fundamental attribution error”?

Answer 9

Fundamental Attribution Error (Correspondence Bias): The tendency for observers to attribute other people’s behavior to internal or dispositional causes and to downplay situational causes.

Question 10

Heuristics: Anchoring and Adjustment

Answer 10

Anchoring and Adjustment: judging frequency or likelihood of an event by using a starting point (an anchor) and then making adjustments up and down.

Question 11

Heuristics: Availability

Answer 11

Judging the frequency or likelihood of an event by the ease with which relevant instances come to mind

Question 12

Heuristics: Representativeness

Answer 12

Judging the frequency or likelihood of events by the extent to which it resembles the typical case.

Question 13

Heuristics: Simulation

Answer 13

Judging the frequency or likelihood of events by the ease with which you can imagine (mentally simulate) it.

Question 14

How do heuristics help us?

Answer 14

Deliberate thinking requires time and effort, and most people prefer to rely on automatic processing when they can. The automatic system sometimes relies on mental shortcuts in order to save time and be efficient in decision making. These heuristics help us make judgements everyday, sometimes they can even save lives.

Question 15

Nina is interviewing for jobs. She believes she gets a better response from potential employers when she wears a specific pair of earrings, so she wears those earrings to every interview. This is an example of what type of error/bias?

Answer 15

Illusory correlation: tendency to overestimate the link between variables that are related only slightly or not at all.

Question 16

During presidential elections, people tend to seek information that paints the candidate they support in a positive light, while dismissing any information that paints them in a negative light. This is an example of what type of error/bias?

Answer 16

Confirmation bias: tendency to notice and search for information that confirms ones beliefs and to ignore information that disconfirms ones beliefs.

Question 17

Ireland is one of the places in the world with the most red-haired people per capita. A person is selected at random from the Irish population. What are the odds of selecting a person with red hair? If you rate the odds as high, you are ignoring the fact that red-haired people only make up only about 10% of the population. This is an example of what type of error/bias?

Answer 17

Base-rate fallacy: tendency to ignore or underuse base rate information and instead to be influenced by the distinctive features of the case being judged.

Question 18

At the Monte Carlo casino in Las Vegas in 1913. The roulette wheel’s ball had fallen on black several times in a row. This led people to believe that it would fall on red soon and they started pushing their chips, betting that the ball would fall in a red square on the next roulette wheel turn. The ball fell on the red square after 27 turns. Accounts state that millions of dollars had been lost by then. This is an example of what type of error/bias?

Answer 18

Gambler’s fallacy: tendency to believe that a particular chance event is affected by previous events and that chance events will “even out” in the short run

Question 19

Avery loves hockey, he believes that every time he wears a certain pair of sweatpants while watching the game, his team will win. This is an example of what type of error/bias?

Answer 19

Illusion of control: the false belief that one can influence certain events, especially random or chance ones

Question 20

Nate thinks he is a master calligrapher but he is really just a college student with very good handwriting, he doesn’t realize that millions of students have excellent handwriting just like him.This is an example of what type of error/bias?

Answer 20

False Uniqueness Effect: tendency to underestimate the number of people who shares ones most prized characteristics and abilities

Question 21

Nina loves pasta. She assumes her friends must all love pasta too, so she makes pasta for all her dinner guests without asking for their input. This is an example of what type of error/bias?

Answer 21

False Consensus Effect: tendency to overestimate the number of other people who share ones opinions, attitudes, values, and beliefs

Question 22

Fiona has decided that she must be seasonally depressed, when she still feels depressed during the summer, she wonders why her seasonal depression is still around. This is an example of what type of error/bias?

Answer 22

Theory Perseverance: proposes that once the mind draws a conclusion, it tends to stick with that conclusion unless there is overwhelming evidence to change it

Question 23

El believes that Harry Styles and Louis Tomilson were once involved in a love relationship, as they consider this as a stance to take for a school essay, they become much more convinced of their beliefs. This is an example of what type of error/bias?

Answer 23

Attitude Polarization: the finding that people’s attitudes become more extreme as they reflect on them.

Question 24

Jack’s organization has a great quarter, meeting and exceeding all the targets set. If the underlying reasons for its performance are unchanged, it will do less well the next quarter. This is an example of what type of error/bias?

Answer 24

Statistical Regression (regression to the mean): the statistical tendency for extreme scores or extreme behavior to be followed by others that are less extreme and closer to the average.

Question 25

Teresa aces her psychology midterm exam and assumes it’s because she studied really hard, when she gets a bad grade on the final exam she assumes that the teacher wrote a bad exam and he ruined her chances of getting a good grade. This is an example of what type of error/bias?

Answer 25

Self-Serving Bias: the tendency to take credit for success but deny blame for failure; or internal attributions for success, external attributions for failure

Question 26

How do our errors and biases help us? how are they harm us?

Answer 26

Help - Most cognitive errors and biases are geared helping the person argue their case and convince others. More often than not, heuristics provide the correct answers, or at least answers that are good enough.
Harm - Mental shortcuts open the door to errors and biases that can harm well-informed, thoughtful decision making. They cause people to be lazy in their thinking and make it more likely someone will rely on faulty anecdotal information instead of the factors playing into the situation at hand.

Question 27

What can we do to reduce bias & errors; what roles do the automatic and deliberate thought processes play?

Answer 27

There are several factors that can help reduce cognitive errors: teaching people not to ignore relevant statistics, making information easier to process, and avoiding thinking about ones feelings while decision making all help reduce cognitive errors
Debiasing: reducing errors and biases by getting people to use deliberate processing rather than automatic processing.
- getting people to use deliberate processes instead of automatic processes like relying on memory; instead they should consider multiple options, use explicit decision rules, search for disconfirmatory information, and use meta-cognition

Question 28

What is counterfactual thinking and how do upward and downward counterfactuals affect us differently?

Answer 28

Counterfactual thinking: imagining alternatives to past or present events or circumstances.
Upward counterfactuals are imagining better alternatives, and downward counterfactuals are imagining worse alternatives.
Generally, upward counterfactuals make people feel worse about themselves and motivate them to improve their lives, and downward counterfactuals make people feel better about themselves.

Question 29

What is meta-cognition?

Answer 29

Meta-cognition is reflecting on one’s own thought processes.

Question 30

How do the terms affect and emotion relate to the automatic and deliberate systems?

Answer 30

Emotion is a deliberate system reaction that is clearly linked to some event, while affect is a automatic system reaction that something is good (positive affect) or bad (negative affect).

Question 31

How do the terms arousal and mood, differ from affect and emotion? How are they related?

Answer 31

Arousal differs from affect and emotion as it refers to the physiological reaction that accompanies most conscious emotion, rather than the automatic conscious reaction (affect) or the emotion itself. Arousal is related to these things because it may accompany both affect and emotion. Mood is different from affect in the way that it is a state of feeling, whereas affect is not, and it’s not the same as emotion, which is a feeling state clearly linked to some event while mood is not linked to any event. It is related to both affect and emotion in the way that affect may sometimes produce a mood and it is the opposite of emotion.

dumbass question

Question 32

What is affective forecasting? Are we good at it?

Answer 32

Affective forecasting: the ability to predict one’s emotional reactions to future events.
Most people are fairly accurate at predicting which emotions they will feel, but they substantially overestimate how long they will feel that way.

Question 33

What is the “affect-as-information hypothesis?”

Answer 33

The affect-as-information hypothesis states that people use subjective emotional processes as sources of information in order to make judgements. This can cause people to disregard probabilities and odds, and may harm decision-making especially if the person misattributes the cause of their emotion.
risk-as-feelings hypothesis: the idea that people rely on emotional processes to evaluate risk, with the result that their judgements may be biased by emotional factors.

Question 34

How does the facial feedback hypothesis relate to people who have Botox treatment?

Answer 34

Facial feedback hypothesis: the idea that feedback from the face muscles evokes or magnifies emotions.
Botox injections reduce muscular feedback from the face, so the brain doesn’t get all the usual input that helps it use emotional information. People with botox have been measured to be worse at recognizing emotion in others.

Question 35

Distinguish examples of emotional experience that represent James-Lang, Cannon-Bard, & Schacter-Singer theories: You are hiking and on the path you’re met with a snake, immediately your heart starts racing and you start sweating. You notice these differences and realize you’re afraid.

Answer 35

James-Lang

Question 36

Distinguish examples of emotional experience that represent James-Lang, Cannon-Bard, & Schacter-Singer theories: You are hiking and on the path you’re met with a snake, immediately your heart starts racing, you start sweating, and you feel terror.

Answer 36

Cannon-Bard

Question 37

Distinguish examples of emotional experience that represent James-Lang, Cannon-Bard, & Schacter-Singer theories: You are called to your boss’ office, your heart is racing and your palms are sweaty, you realize you’re nervous. Your boss says she wants to give you a raise, your heart is still racing and you’re still sweating, but now you feel excited.

Answer 37

Schacter-Singer

Question 38

What does excitation transfer have to do with misattribution of arousal?

Answer 38

Excitation Transfer: the idea that arousal from one event can transfer to a later event.
There is a disconnect between the brain and the body- physical arousal from one event can transfer to the other which may lead to people to thinking the later event caused the arousal (misattribution).

Question 39

What are affect balance and life satisfaction measures of?

Answer 39

Affect balance and life satisfaction are both measures of happiness.

Question 40

What does research suggest about the subjective and objective roots of happiness?

Answer 40

Objectively: People who have money, a good job, a happy relationship, friends, and good health are generally happier than people who lack these things- but the difference is pretty weak. The human emotional system is set up do it’s very hard for a person to be happy alone in life.
Subjectively: Happiness appears to lie more in our outlook and personality than in our circumstances; subjective feelings and approaches to life are strong predictors of happiness.

Question 41

How is happiness linked to health and how can we change our happiness?

Answer 41

Happy people are healthy people- positive emotions have direct effects on the body that improve health.
Many practices like meditation, expressing gratitude, exercise, and being optimistic all increase happiness. Happiness is strongly linked to good social relations.

Question 42

What does the research tell us about catharsis theory and anger?

Answer 42

Catharsis theory: the proposition that expressing negative emotions produces a healthy release of those emotions and is therefore good for the psyche.
Research does not support catharsis theory, venting anger keep arousal high and keeps anger and aggression alive - tends to exacerbate aggression and conflict. Venting anger is also linked to heart disease.

Question 43

What is the difference between guilt and shame?

Answer 43

Guilt is an unpleasant moral emotion associated with a specific instance in which one has acted badly or wrongly, while shame is a moral emotion that, like guilt, involves feeling bad but, unlike guilt, spreads to the whole person. Guilt motivates people to be more prosocial while shame is usually destructive.

Question 44

How does this difference relate to Carol Dwecks research on implicit theories?

Answer 44

Guilt is far more constructive than shame,