Heuristics, shortcuts, and errors in attribution Flashcards
Heuristics
Using cognitive representations or experiences as proxies for objective data
Representativeness
judgements based on similarity. Objects or events in the same category do tend to resemble each other
Misperception of randomness
People are always looking for some systematic relationship. therefore, there is a tendency to underweight randomness as a cause, and view events as more meaningful than then actually are
Availability heuristic
Judgements based on the ease with which information comes to mind.
What factors are more likely to be judged as causal?
- salient
- primed
- accessible
Anchoring and adjustment heuristic
When making a decision, people tend to find a similar previous situation and adjust it to decide how to act in the current situation
Are people good at picking the correct heuristic?
No, people are notoriously bad at picking the right anchor and adjusting correctly
Counterfactual attributions
Judgements based on ease of imagination. the ease of imagining something is related to the likelihood of the real event taking place.
What factors might affect imaginability?
- recency
- actions
- typicality
Two-stage model of attribution
stage 1: automatic internal attribution serves as an anchor
stage 2: effortful adjustment for situational factors, if time and motivation permit
If a person is under stress, what kind of attribution are they likely to make?
Internal
The fundamental attribution bias
The tendency to attribute behaviour internally
What are the possible reasons for the fundamental attribution bias?
- focusing on the actors behaviour rather than the situation, so the actor in more salience proportionally to the situational background
- differential forgetting of situational causes while remembering dispositional causes
- linguistic facilitation (some languages make it easier to describe the actors rather then the situation)
Cognitive load
interferes with taking situational information into account
