ch. 3

confirmation bias

a tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence

heuristic

a thinking strategy that enables quick, efficient judgments

behavioral confirmation

a type of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby people's social expectations lead them to behave in ways that cause others to confirm their expectations

When the persistence of one's initial conceptions are discredited, but an explanation of why the belief might be true survives, this persistence is identified as:

belief perseverance

______ intuition appears in how we take in, store, and retrieve social information

illusory

counterfactual thinking

imagining alternative scenarios and outcomes that might have happened, but didn't

misinformation effect

incorporating misleading information into one's memory of an event

Mitchell, Thompson, and colleagues report that people recall mildly pleasant events more favorably than they experienced them, a phenomenon called:

rosy retrospective

Daniel Kahneman:

we have two brain systems (system 1, system 2, heuristics)

Herb Simon (bounded rationality):

we use short cuts to think about and make decisions, otherwise we would be exhausted

availability heuristic

A cognitive rule that judges the likelihood of things in terms of their availability in memory. If instances of something come readily to mind, we presume it to be commonplace.

priming

activating particular associations in memory

spontaneous recovery

an effortless, automatic inference of a trait after exposure to someones behavior

self-fulfilling prophecy

an expectation that causes you to act in ways that make that expectation come true.

dispositional attribution

attributing behavior to the person's disposition and traits

people often choose their news sources and facebook friends to align with their beliefs, a phenomenon known as:

ideological echo chambers

Misatribution

mistakenly attributing a behavior to the wrong source

illusory correlation

perception of a relationship where none exists, or perception of a stronger relationship than actually exists

we worry about remote possibilities while ignoring higher probabilities. Social scientists refer to this as our:

probability neglect

Changing our memory of past behaviors to fit current perspectives or attitudes is called ______ of past behaviors.

reconstruction

embodied cognition

the mutual influence of bodily sensations on cognitive preferences and social judgments

regression toward the average

the statistical tendency for extreme scores or extreme behavior to return toward one's average

fundamental attribution error

the tendency for observers, when analyzing another's behavior, to underestimate the impact of the situation and to overestimate the impact of personal disposition

representativeness heuristic

the tendency to presume, sometimes despite contrary odds, that someone or something belongs to a particular group if resembling (representing) a typical member

attribution theory

the theory of how we explain others behavior- for example by attributing it to external situations or internal dispositions

Anthony Greenwald describes our tendency to revise the past to suit our present views as having _____ egos

totalitarian