PSYC212 Flashcards
What are the four types of heuristics?
representativeness
availability
anchoring and adjustment
mental simulation
what is the representativeness heuristic?
judgement based on similarity - people/objects/events tend to look similar to things that act in the same way.
what is a error in the representativeness heuristic?
people tend to make patterns out of things that are actually random.
people/objects/events dont always act the same as things they look like.
what is the availability heuristic?
judgements based on the ease with which information comes to mind
what is an error with the availability heuristic?
salience, priming, and accessability cause errors as the info that comes to mind the easier is not always a good indicator of the actual way things are, and can easily be influenced/manipulated.
what is the fundamental attribution error?
the tendency to over atribute behaviour to internal factors
what is the actor-observer effect?
the tendency to make make the FAE more with others than with ourselves.
what is the achoring and adjustment heuristic?
judgements tied to the inital standards. people always subconsiously attach to anchors that are mentioned. this can be accurate if the right anchor and correct adjustment are used.
eg. asked to guess salary - high anchor = higher guess, low anchor = lower guess
what is the risk of anchoring and adjustment heuristic?
that the person will be influnced by an incorrect anchor, or that their adjustment will not be made due to stage two of the model of attribution not being completed
hypothetically which mental state would the anchoring and adjustment heuristic be most accurate in?
a mental state which is not stressed of cognitively loaded so that correct adjustment (stage 2 model of attribution) could be made.
what is the two stage model of attribution?
stage 1 - automatic internal attribution sevres as an anchor (how someone behaves must be who they are)
stage 2 - effor adjustment for situational factors (if time and motivation permit)
what is the prediction of the two stage model of attribution?
that when people are stressed or under cognitive load, they will be more likely to make the FAE and internal atrtributions as they arent taking time to adjust (complete stage 2)
what is the mental simulation (counterfactuals) heuristic?
judgements based on an ease of imagination (how easy it is to imagine a scenario or event different from what it is).
eg it is easy to imagine someone riding a bike sober and not slipping, so a drunk person on a bike slipping is attributed to the drunkeness of the person.
what effects the imaginability in the mental simulation hueristic?
recency (the events most recent are likely to be blamed as it is easy to image them being to blame), action (action is blamed more than lack of action), typicality (doing something out of the ordinary will likely be blamed for the different outcome)
why is action blamed more than inaction under the mental simulation heuristic?
people it is easier to image someone not doing an action than it is to image someone preventing someone else’s action.
eg. you can imagine someone not murdering someone but its harder to image someone stopping a murderer
