Unit 3 - Ch ? Language And Thought Flashcards
The more developed one’s language skills are…
The clearer their vision and understanding of the world will be
Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis
Who and what?
Sapir-Whorf
Language may influence our thoughts, shaping how we understand reality
Framing and Evaluative Biases
Language is not descriptive but affects what we think
Describing someone nosey vs curious, discourage vs encourage
Discourse analysis
A field of study that looks at how language distorts and influences one’s understanding of reality and people
Framing and Gender Biases
Gender double standards.
A Man speaking out is assertive
A Woman speaking out is aggressive or bossy
Framing and “Our Side” Bias
Connected to sports
Our side is “star players”. Their players are “prima donnas” (inflate their own importance)
Language not only describes but…
Evaluates
Animal communication
Basically always clear cut. Same calls always mean the same thing.
Denotative Meaning
Dictionary definition. Same for everyone (roughly)
Connotative Meaning
Symbolic definition - ex. Love - people can view what love means and is very differently
Based on one’s associations and personal or cultural experiences
Ostensive Definition
“Pointing-to” type of definition
What’s a door? Point to it.
How do we learn language? Nativits perspective.
(Who and what?)
Chomsky
Humans are born innate with the ability to acquire language. People have a Language Acquisitipn Devive (LAD), but must be activated/turned on at a young age or it’s lost.
What part of language can be lost if you don’t start learning it early enough?
Grammar
How do we learn language? Behaviorists perspective.
(Who and what?)
Skinner
Language learned though experience (nurture). Kids learn by mimicking the speech of others, and the responses they get (said mama, parents happy, say more. Positive reinforcement).
Kids learn language with ostensive definitions (point to)
Effects of being bilingual
Some brain connections and neural networks are developed
Can suppress one language while learning another
Linked to ability to resist distraction
Offers person two ‘lenses’ to interpret the world
Uncritical and critical thinking
Fast thinking (snap decisions)
Slow thinking (reasoning)
What are Heuristics?
Fast mental shortcuts to find solutions.
I want ice-cream. I know to go to the dairy aisle of the store instead of looking around.
Availability Heuristics
A heuristic for how often an event occurs.
Tied to a fallacy that more vivid but rare events happen more than they actually do. The more easily a person can think of an event, the more often the person thinks it happens.
Bright lights and bells from winning a slot machine. Scary vivid events like plane crashes.
Representative Heuritics
Judging the likelihood of how much A represents B.
Person dresses like stereotypically? You might expect them to be that stereotype.
Conjuction Fallacy
The belief that two co-occurrence of two events is more likely than one of the events.
Linda is a bank teller and a feminist is narrower than just Lina is a bank teller
Thinking flaw, Fixation
Inability to see a problem from a fresh perspective. Tendency to get stuck in one way of thinking
Thinking flaw, Functional fixedness
Tendency to see the function of objects as fixed.
Something surprisingly that may be useful for solving complex problems
Unconscious processing
Szasz’s saying
In the animal Kingdom, the rule is eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, it is define or be defined
Two models of decision-making
Homo economicus
Homo psychologicus
Beliefs of Homo economicus
Humans are fully “rational actors”.
Possess perfect infinite.
Derived from microeconomics.
Person selects objective best choice.
Updates belief as new information become avaliable.
Beliefs of Homo psychologicus
Humans are “boundedly rational”.
People don’t have perfect info.
People “satisfices” choices.
People are reluctant to change beliefs.
Social pressures may make people belive non-rational things or act against beliefs.
