THINKING Flashcards
Additive strategy
The process of listing the attributes of each element of a decision, weighing them according to importance, adding them up, and determining which one is more appealing based on the result.
Algorithm
A step-by-step procedure that is guaranteed to solve a problem.
Attitudes
Evaluations people make about objects, ideas, events, or other people.
Attributions
Inferences people make about the causes of events and behavior.
Automatic thoughts
Self-defeating judgments people make about themselves.
Availability heuristic
A rule-of-thumb strategy in which people estimate probability based on how quickly they remember relevant instances of an event.
Centration
The tendency to focus on one aspect of a problem and ignore other key aspects.
Cognition
Thinking. It involves mental activities such as understanding, problem solving, decision making, and creativity.
Cognitive development
The development of thinking capacity.
Cognitive schema
A mental model of some aspect of the world.
Concept
A mental category that groups similar objects, events, qualities, or actions.
Confabulation
A phenomenon in which a person thinks he or she remembers something that did not really happen.
Convergent thinking
A style of thinking in which a person narrows down a list of possibilities to arrive at a single right answer.
Creativity
The ability to generate novel, useful ideas.
Decentration
The ability to focus simultaneously on several aspects of a problem.
Decision-making
The process of weighing alternatives and choosing among them.
Deductive reasoning
g - The process by which a particular conclusion is drawn from a set of general premises or statements.
Dialectical reasoning
A process of going back and forth between opposing points of view in order to come up with a satisfactory solution to a problem.
Divergent thinking
A style of thinking in which people’s thoughts go off in different directions as they try to generate many different solutions to a problem.
External attribution
An inference that a person’s behavior is due to situational factors. It is also called situational attribution.
External locus of control
The tendency to believe that circumstances are not within one’s control but rather are due to luck, fate, or other people.
Feigned scarcity
Implying that a product is in scarce supply, even when it is not, in order to increase demand for it.
Fixation
inability to progress normally from one psychosexual stage of development into another.
Foot-in-the-door phenomenon
The tendency to agree to a difficult request if one has first agreed to an easy request.
Functional fixedness
The tendency to think only of an object’s most common use in solving a problem.
Fundamental attribution error
The tendency to attribute other people’s behavior to internal factors such as personality traits, abilities, and feelings. It is also called correspondence bias.
Gambler’s fallacy
The false belief that a chance event is more likely if it hasn’t happened recently.
Groupthink
The tendency of a close-knit group to emphasize consensus at the expense of critical thinking and rational decision making.
Group polarization
The tendency for a dominant point of view in a group to be strengthened to a more extreme position after a group discussion.
Heuristic
A general rule of thumb that may lead to, but doesn’t guarantee, a correct solution to a problem.
Hierarchical classification
The ability to classify according to more than one level.
Hindsight bias
The tendency to interpret the past in a way that fits the present.
Implicit attitudes
Beliefs that are unconscious but that can still influence decisions and behavior.
Inductive reasoning
The drawing of a general conclusion from certain premises or statements.
Internal attribution
An inference that an event or a person’s behavior is due to personal factors such as traits, abilities, or feelings. It is also called dispositional attribution.
Irreversibility
The inability to mentally reverse an operation.
Just world hypothesis
The tendency to believe that the world is fair and that people get what they deserve.
Locus of control
People’s perception of whether or not they have control over circumstances in their lives.
Lowball technique
The act of making an attractive proposition and revealing its downsides only after a person has agreed to it.
Mental set
A tendency to use only solutions that have worked in the past.
Moral reasoning
The reasons and processes that cause people to think the way they do about right and wrong.
Overconfidence effect
The tendency for people to be too certain that their beliefs, decisions, estimates, and accuracy of recall are correct.
Preconscious
The part of the mind that contains information that is outside of a person’s attention, which is not currently being attended to, but which is readily accessible if needed.
Prejudice
A negative belief or feeling about a particular group of individuals.
Primary process thinking
Thinking that is irrational, illogical, and motivated by a desire of immediate gratification of impulses.
Problem solving
The active effort people make to achieve a goal that cannot be easily attained.
Prototype
A typical example of a concept.
Representativeness heuristic
Representativeness heuristic - A rule-of-thumb strategy that estimates the probability of an event based on how typical that event is.
Reversibility
The ability to reverse actions mentally.
Risky shift
The tendency for a dominant, risky point of view in a group to be strengthened to an even riskier position after a group discussion.
Schema
A mental model of an object or event that includes knowledge about it as well as beliefs and expectations.
Secondary process thinking
Thinking that is logical and rational.
Self-efficacy
Confidence in one’s ability to meet challenges effectively.
Self-serving bias
The tendency to attribute successes to internal factors and failures to situational factors.
Social schemas
Mental models that represent and categorize social events and people.
Symbolic thought
The ability to represent objects in terms of mental symbols.
Transformation
Making a series of changes to achieve a specific goal.
Trial and error
Trying out different solutions until one works.
Intelligence
The capacity to acquire and apply knowledge. It includes the ability to benefit from past experience, act purposefully, solve problems, and adapt to new situations.
Confirmation bias
The tendency to look for and accept evidence that supports what one wants to believe and to ignore or reject evidence that refutes those beliefs.
Elimination by aspects
The process of eliminating alternatives in a decision based on whether they do or do not possess aspects or attributes the decision maker has deemed necessary or desirable.
Expected value
The process of adding the value of a win times the probability of a win to the value of a loss times the probability of a loss in order to make a decision.
Optimism
The tendency to expect positive outcomes.
Stereotypes
Beliefs about people based on their membership in a particular group.
Subjective utility
The process of making a decision by estimating the personal value of a decision’s outcome.
