Social Cognition – Errors, Biases, and Heuristics Flashcards
The phrase “throwing good money after bad” illustrates which of the following?
A. base rate fallacy
B. sunk-cost fallacy
C. hindsight bias
D. confirmation bias
Answer B is correct. The sunk-cost fallacy is the tendency for people to continue investing resources (e.g., money) to achieve desired outcomes when they have already invested significant resources that have not produced desired outcomes and/or are not recoverable.
A college sophomore has decided to drop out of college at the end of the semester “to see the world,” and she prefers talking to friends and family members who support her decision and avoids talking to those who think it’s a bad idea. This illustrates which of the following?
A. contrast error
B. self-serving bias
C. confirmation bias
D. false consensus effect
Answer C is correct. The confirmation bias is the tendency to seek and pay attention to information that confirms our attitudes and beliefs and avoid or ignore information that refutes them.
When relying on the representativeness heuristic to make judgments, we:
A. distort disconfirming information.
B. ignore base rates.
C. focus on previous errors.
D. focus on socially desirable alternatives.
Answer B is correct. When relying on the representativeness heuristic, people ignore base rates and other important information and base their judgments about the frequency or likelihood of an event on the extent to which the event resembles a prototype (typical case).
_____________ are “mental shortcuts” that allow us to make quick judgments about people or events but can lead to inaccurate conclusions.
A. Mnemonic devices
B. Prototypes
C. Cognitive schemas
D. Heuristics
Answer D is correct. Heuristics are “mental shortcuts that provide quick estimates about the likelihood of uncertain events” (Baumeister & Bushman, 2013, p. 164). Although heuristics can be useful when it’s necessary to make quick judgments, they can produce inaccurate conclusions.
The conjunction fallacy is best explained by which of the following heuristics?
A. representativeness
B. availability
C. simulation
D. anchoring and adjustment
Answer A is correct. The representativeness heuristic is most useful for understanding the conjunction fallacy, which occurs because people are more likely to rely on representativeness than on logic or probability theory when making probability judgments.
A customer who is in a long line behind you at the checkout counter says, “no matter what line I get into, it’s always the slowest one.” This is an example of which of the following?
A. illusory correlation
B. base rate fallacy
C. sleeper effect
D. counterfactual thinking
Answer A is correct. An illusory correlation occurs when we overestimate the correlation between two variables that are unrelated or only slightly related.
