Thought and Language Flashcards

Question

confirmation bias

Answer 1

the beliefs we hold influence how we process information prefer to seek confirmation than to falsify hypothesis

Answer 2

making judgements: drawing conclusions from expereince shortcuts that are correct much of the time (fast thinking) helps conserve cognitive resources availability heuristic - probability estimates are influences by how easy it is to retrieve information - used to judge frequency of something happening

Answer 3

heuristics: shortcut methods to solving problems and making decisions means end analysis and hill climbing means end analysis: work step by step to get closer to your goal as you solve the problem. monitor each step to see how much closer you are to the goal. - participants perform a series of several moves, followed by a long pause, then another series of moves hill climbing: change the present state of the problem so that you are one step closer to solving the problem

Answer 4

thinking in a divergent way - process of creating mutiple, unique ideas or solutions to a problem that you are trying to solve framing a problem - option is presented as a loss (negative) or a gain (positive). People are generally biased toward picking an option they view as a gain over one they view as a loss, even if both options lead to the same result.

Answer 5

mental set and functional fixedness - A mental set is where you persist in approaching a problem in a way that has worked in the past but is clearly not working now. Functional fixedness is a type of mental set where you cannot perceive an object being used for something other than what it was designed for.

Answer 6

- not enough evidence to support the strong verison of this that language determines thought - increasing evidence that language can influence many aspects of our thought in subtle ways by making it easier to process certain cognitive operations

Answer 7

language reinforces categories - there are a group of universal focal colours that are privileged for memory languge boundaries - russia has two names to describe the colour blue but we only have one but the colour boundary is almost indentical Found – Russians were faster to discriminate 2 colors if they fell into two categories of "blue" than if they were in the one category Evidence – could determine boundary for light blue and dark blue and do it faster. English showed no difference as we don’t have separate distinction as we would call all of them blue Russians have categorical advantage

Answer 8

spatial metaphors reinforce habitual ways of thinking about time Wednesdays lecture has been moved two days foward - we can change this depending on the context we place people in - friday from ego moving perspective, monday from time moving perspective

Answer 9

the language one speaks can generate a specific style of thinking western style analytic - focus on objects and properties - prefernce for avoiding contradictions, determining which position is correct eastern style holistic - emphasising contexts and relations between elements - preference for dialectical (compromise) approaches and tolerance for contradictions priming a language can activate a general cognitive style of thinking chinese-english bilinguals - chine version scored hgiher on dialectical thinking than english version - language encodes different styles of thinking

Answer 10

social biases intelligence - the ability to acquire knowledge, to think and reason effectively and to deal adaptively with the environment samuel morton 1820s-1850s believed head size was related to intelligence. ranked races off head size. paul broca 1824-1880 - weighed brains and compared groups. he believed the heavier brain you had the more intelligence you had -gender biases francis galton 1822-1911 - intelligence was hereditary - coined the term eugenics (the scientifically erroneous and immoral theory of “racial improvement” and “planned breeding,”) - did not find any relation to social class alfred binet 1857-1911 - pionered intelligence testing - stanford binet iq test - intelligence was a psychological construct that was a general ability

Answer 11

social biases on our understanding of the construct of intelligence Alpha test – given to people wanting to go into military to see who was fit for each role Reflected cultural norms of American people so people who didn’t grow up in America or spoke English had a huge disadvantage Used to sort out immigrants because of mental makeup become a burden to the state or produce offspring that will be troubled Anyone who showed signs of mental disease or trouble were not allowed in

Answer 12

mental age now replaced with standardised score solution: abandon mental age - calculate iq relative to other adults scores - normal curve (IQ, weight, height, etc) - IQ of 100 is the average of an age group - 2/3 of people in the age group will fall between 85-115 development of sub-scales - verbal comprehension - working memory - perceptual reasoning - processing speed

Answer 13

the substantial and consistent rise in average IQ scores observed over the past century in numerous countries, why might our scores on abstract reasoning tasks be increasing? - High component around vocab in these tests, we are getting better with vocab ideas that the world is getting more complex so we have to engage in a higher level or reasoning and problem solving which is having an effect on the results of these scales

Answer 14

g - (general) intelligence charcterised by a single underlying factor. underlies performance on all intelligence subtests s - (specific) factors specific to type of task. group of skills that correlate better together

Answer 15

sternberg: three components of intelligence that are better at predicting success in life - 1. analytic, 2. creative, 3. practical - thinks you need all of these aspects of intelligence to be knowledgeable in the real world - analytic - assess the value of the idea - creative - generate ideas - practical - carry out idea

Answer 16

- no such thing as a single itelligence - many types of intelligences - modular view of the mind/ some skills before others, can be good at some things but not others linguistic - poetry, writing musical - composition logical-mathematical - logical reasoning and maths spatial - maniuplating images, reading a map bodily-kinesthetic - motor control interpersonal - being happy and getting along with others intrapersonal - being happy within your self

Answer 17

F - ability to learn percieve relationships, deal with new problems. stops increasing and begins to decline after adolescence C- acquired knowledge from culture continues to increase with age

Answer 18

- group means have no direct implications for individuals - within group and between group differences might not have similar causes evidence of an enviromental explanation for the relation between iq and ethnicity - gap between african and european based americans is decreasing rapidly - mean iq scores of immigrant groups increase over generations, as enviroment influences development of particular cognitive abilites - african american children adopted into high SES families show higher iq scores than those who remain in lower SES home sterotype threat as a partial explanation for group differences - spencer, steele and quinn 1999 - difference in performance could be eliminated when we lowered sterotype threat by describing the test as not producing gender differences. when described as producing gender differences and stereotype threat was high women preformed worse than men did

Answer 19

- need variation in a population to measure adequately - pre and post natal enviroment (nutrition, teratogens, stimulatoin, truama, schooling) has a direct influence on intelligence twin studies are used to estimate heritability - resemblance between iq scores of identical twins in different enviroments - resemlance between iq scores of identical twins vs fraternal twins limitations of heritability studies - challenge the idea that environment's are as similar for MZ twins and DZ twins - heritability estimates vary as a function of SES