Social Psychology, 4: Decision Making Flashcards
Loss Aversion
The tendency for losses to be weighed more heavily in choice than gains of an identical resource.
Status Quo Bias
The human tendency to favor choices that leave the current state of affairs as they are.
Omission Bias
The human tendency to favor choices that involve the default (doing nothing).
Anchoring effect
The human tendency to search for any number (even a random one) when judging an uncertain quantity, and adjust their estimate from there.
Panic-button effect
Otherwise stressful circumstances do not cause stress when a person believes they can control them (i.e., through a ‘panic button’ that will stop the aversive stimulus), even when the person never uses the option to stop the stimulus.
Self-regulation
aka Self Control or Willpower. Like a muscle, exertion depletes it in the short term, and builds it up over the long term.
Reactance
The tendency for people to like having a sense of choice or freedom in matters. Sometimes this leads people to exert effort to keep options open that they otherwise do not even desire.
Certainty effect
People greatly prefer certain outcomes to anything involving probability. i.e., the example wherein people will pay much more to remove the last bullet in a game of russian roulette than they would pay to remove one of the last two bullets.
Two phases of decision making
1) Whittling down many options to 2) a few for more careful consideration. Most research and theory in DM focuses on how people process phase 2.
Learned helplessness
A state of shutting down or quitting trying to avoid negative consequences due to feedback that suggests that efforts are of no avail. More likely to occur to an ‘entity theorist’ (someone who believes that performance is mostly due to inborn talents).
Free Will
Freedom of the self to make one’s own choices, rather than being a product of cause and effect. Psychological scientists disagree on whether it is “real,” though it is clear that humans have greater behavioral options than other species.
Effects of Rejecting Free Will
In experiments, people who are randomly assigned to conditions that cause them to lose belief in free will, they act more antisocially when given the opportunity (i.e., cheating on a test).
Positive Illusions and Goals
Research shows that people have more positive illusions (optimism) when pursuing goals. When setting goals, people tend to be more realistic.
Zeigarnik effect
Memory for incomplete tasks is greater than memory for completed tasks. Helps people remember to return to unfinished business.
Changing Habits
Most effective when: 1) a transition changes a person’s usual context 2) a person breaks the association between cues in the environment that trigger the habit, and the habit itself.
