Psyc 305 Exam 5

Which of the following is TRUE of covariation?

Illusory covariations sometimes generate prejudice toward groups of people.

framing

In the context of decision making, a term referring to how the options for a decision (or, in some cases, the decision itself) are described. Often, the framing determines whether the decision is cast in terms of gains or positive attributes (e.g., what you might gain from this or that option), or whether the decision is cast in terms of losses or negative attributes.

diagnostic information

Information about a particular case; often contrasted with base-rate information.

Which of the following statements about the role of the neuronal workspace in executive control is FALSE?

It prevents activity from occurring in multiple areas of the brain, to avoid confusion.

A dealer shuffles a standard pack of playing cards, including 26 red cards (diamonds and hearts) and 26 black cards (spades and clubs), and turns the card on top of the deck face up. If the face-up card is red, the gambler wins $11. If the face-up card is black, the gambler loses $9. Utility maximization theory predicts which response?

Most people will accept the gamble According to expected value theory, the overall expected value for this gamble is (0.5 × $11) + (0.5 × -$9) = +$1. Therefore, assuming that the majority of people act completely rationally, most people should accept the gamble.

Now consider the same gamble again: If the face-up card is red, the gambler wins $11; if the face-up card is black, the gambler loses $9. Which response best describes actual people's behavior?

Most people will reject the gamble Research has shown that most people consider the prospect of a loss to be between 1.5 and 2 times more negative than the prospect of an equivalent gain is positive. This loss aversion predicts that most people will not accept the gamble.

"Opt-in" organ donation programs, where adults can choose to enroll in the program, have approximately 15% participation rates; "opt-out" organ donation programs, in which adults are enrolled by default and can choose to decline participation in the program, have approximately 90% participation rates. What best explains this difference?

Opt-out framing makes organ donation seem normal, opt-in framing makes it seem like a special act. People don't just weigh the costs and benefits of different options, how those options are framed can influence their decisions.

Which of the following claims about consciousness and memory is FALSE?

Outside of laboratory circumstances, we are unlikely to be influenced by the workings of implicit memory.

The text describes one study in which some participants were asked to come up with 6 examples of times when they had been assertive in the past and others were asked to come up with 12 examples. Which of the following best describes the results of this study?

Participants who were asked to come up with fewer examples judged themselves to be more assertive.

Patrick has sustained damage to his orbitofrontal cortex, but his twin brother, Ben, has not. Which of the following statements is most likely to be true about these two brothers?

Patrick will take more risks than Ben.

four-card task

See selection task.

metacognitive skills

Skills that allow people to monitor and control their own mental processes.

somatic markers

States of the body used in decision making. For example, a tight stomach and an accelerated heart rate when a person is thinking about a particular option can signal to the person that the option has risk associated with it.

premises

The assertions used as the starting point for a logical argument. The premises may or may not be true; logic is concerned instead only with whether a conclusion follows from the premises.

cognitive unconscious

The broad set of mental activities of which people are completely unaware but that make possible ordinary thinking, remembering, reasoning, and so on.

mind-body problem

The difficulty in understanding how the mind (a nonphysical entity) and the body (a physical entity) can influence each other, so that physical events can cause mental events, and mental events can cause physical ones.

affective forecasting

The process in which a person predicts how he or she will feel at some future point about an object or state of affairs. It turns out that people are surprisingly inaccurate in these predictions and (for example) understate their own capacity to adapt to changes.

utility maximization

The proposal that people make decisions by selecting the option that has the greatest utility.

qualia (Sing. quale)

The subjective conscious experiences, or "raw feels," of awareness. Examples include the pain of a headache and the exact flavor of chocolate.

inspection time

The time a person needs to make a simple discrimination between two stimuli; used in some settings as a measure of mental speed, and then used as a way to test the claim that intelligent people literally have faster processing in their brains.

If theory X is correct, then outcome Y will occur in my experiment. Evaluate this conditional and pick the 2 types of evidence that would allow for valid inference.

Theory X is correct Outcome Y did not occur

Which of the statements below would complete the following syllogism in a way to make it valid?: All busy people are stressed out. All professors are busy.

Therefore, all professors are stressed out.

confirmation bias

a family of effects in which people seem more sensitive to evidence that confirms their beliefs than they are to evidence that challenges their beliefs. Thus, if people are given a choice about what sort of information they would like in order to evaluate their beliefs, they request information that's likely to confirm their beliefs. Likewise, if they're presented with both confirming and disconfirming evidence, they're more likely to pay attention to, be influenced by, and remember the confirming evidence, rather than the disconfirming.

general intelligence

a mental capacity that is hypothesized as contributing to the performance of virtually any intellectual task. The existence of g is documented by the statistical overlap, usually revealed through factor analysis, among diverse forms of mental testing.

availability heuristic

a particular for of attribute substitution in which the person needs to judge the frequency of a certain type of object or the likelihood of a certain type of event. For this purpose, the person is likely to assess the ease with which examples of the object or event come to mind; this "availability" of examples is then used as an index of frequency or likelihood.

Induction

a pattern of reasoning in which a person seeks to draw general claims from specific bits of evidence. Often contrasted with deduction.

crystallized intelligence

a person's acquired knowledge, including their repertoire of verbal knowledge and cognitive skills.

theory of multiple intelligence

a proposal that there are many forms of intelligence, including linguistic, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, and personal.

neuronal workplace hypothesis

a specific claim about how the brain makes conscious experience possible; the proposal is that "workplace neurons" link together the activity of various specialized brain areas, and this linkage makes possible integration and comparison of different types of information.

representative heuristic

a strategy that is often used in making judgments about categories. This strategy is broadly equivalent to making the assumption that, in general, the instances of a category will resemble the prototype for that category and, likewise, that the prototype resembles each instance.

heuristic

a strategy that is reasonably efficient and works most of the time. In using a heuristic, the person is choosing to accept some risk of error in order to gain efficiency.

emotional intelligence

ability to understand one's own and other's emotions and to control one's emotions appropriately.

In a 1997 experiment, participants first were asked whether the Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi died before or after a certain age, and then were asked to guess the precise age at which Gandhi died. People who were first asked whether or not Gandhi died at age 9 gave an estimate (50 years) much lower on average than those who were first asked whether or not he died at age 140 (67 years). This experiment is a perfect example of which of the following?

anchoring The initial question anchored participants' subsequent judgments of Gandhi's precise age at his death.

Some grays are aliens Some grays are evil Therefore some aliens are evil What is the likely source of the error for someone mistakenly claiming this syllogism is valid?

atmosphere effect

What are the two primary components of mindfulness? (pick 2)

attending to what is currently in mind nonjudgmental acceptance of thoughts

"All rectangles have four sides. All squares have four sides. Therefore all rectangles are squares." This incorrect statement is an example of

categorical syllogism.

People are often selective in how they search memory for evidence. As a result, they usually search memory

for evidence that might confirm their current beliefs.

Research from a Harvard business professor and a behavioral economist found that Americans ________________.

greatly underestimated the degree of inequality in the distribution of wealth.

base-rate information

information about the broad likelihood of a particular category or type of event (also referred to as "prior probability") Often contrasted with diagnostic information.

metamemory

people's knowledge about, awareness of, and control over their own memory

The four-card task provides an example of how

poor we are at reasoning about conditional statements.

Generally speaking, when individuals are making a decision involving a possible loss they will:

risk a small chance of losing a lot rather than a large chance of losing a little

Pick the 3 facets of social cognition Piff and colleagues theorize are affected by social class.

self-concept interpersonal interactions construing others

Jill has a gut feeling about which college she should attend. In Damasio's words, she is relying on ________ to make her decision.

somatic markers

All other things being equal, when two people are jointly provided an award they will likely _________________.

split it evenly

Much of our current understanding of consciousness derives from

studies of what can be done in the absence of consciousness.

Biologically, attention seems to

sustain activity within a neural system as well as link the activities between different neural systems.

fluid intelligence

the ability to deal with new and unusual problems

practical intelligence

the ability to solve everyday problems through skilled reasoning that relies on tacit knowledge acquired through experience.

A great deal of behind-the-scenes activity is necessary to make possible intellectual achievements like thinking and remembering. This behind-the-scenes activity is referred to by psychologists as

the cognitive unconscious.

validity

the extent to which a method or procedure measures what it is supposed to measure. Validity is assessed in a variety of ways, including through predictive validity.

In one study, participants in Group 1 were given a pill and told, "This pill will make you a bit jumpy, will make your palms sweat, and may give you butterflies in your stomach." Participants in Group 2 were given the same pill, but they were told, "This pill may make you a little sleepy." In both cases, the pill was a placebo. All participants were then exposed to electric shocks and were asked to rate how painful each shock had seemed. Given other evidence, we would expect that

the participants in Group 1 would rate the shocks as less painful than the participants in Group 2.

With regard to the "man who" arguments described by Nisbett and Ross (1980),

they reflect our willingness to take a small sample of data as seriously as a larger sample.

Type 1 thinking

A commonly used name for judgment and reasoning strategies that are fast and effortless, but prone to error.

Which of the following pieces of evidence supports Piff et al.'s hypothesis that lower class individuals have a communal and upper class individuals have an agentic focus in self-concept?

lower status participants choice of typical pens and higher status participants choice of unique pens

When people are explicitly told that a particular instance is NOT representative of the larger group, they

often continue to reason as if the instance were indeed representative.

reliability

the degree of consistency with which a test measures a trait or attribute.

Dr. Piff and colleagues found that:

upper class individuals were more likely than lower class individuals to display unethical behavior.

All grays are aliens Some grays are evil Therefore some aliens are evil Evaluate this syllogism.

valid but not sound Yes! I'm often asked if the inclusion of "some" automatically prevents a syllogism from being valid so I like to include this example of a valid categorical syllogism using the term "some". It obviously isn't sound because everyone knows that the grays are a completely benevolent alien race and don't have the capacity to be evil.

Identify the premises in the following syllogism: All Dalmatians are dogs. Some Dalmatians have tails. Therefore, some dogs have tails.

"All Dalmatians are dogs."

Imagine you are presented with the following scenario: Problem 1 Assume yourself richer by $300 than you are today, You have to choose between A. a sure gain of $100 B. 50% chance to gain $200 and 50% chance to gain nothing Which choice will most people make given Problem 1?

A

Type 2 thinking

A commonly used name for judgment and reasoning strategies that are slower and require more effort than Type 1 thinking.

attribute substitution

A commonly used strategy in which a person needs one type of information but relies instead on a more accessible form of information. This strategy works well if the more accessible form of information is, in fact, well correlated with the desired information. An example is the case in which someone needs information about how frequent an event is in the world and relies instead on how easily he or she can think of examples of the event.

categorical syllogisms

A logical argument containing two premises and a conclusion, and concerned with the properties of, and relations between, categories. An example is "All trees are plants. All plants require nourishment. Therefore, all trees require nourishment." This is a valid syllogism, since the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion.

stereotype threat

A mechanism through which a person's performance is influenced by her perception that her score will confirm stereotypes about their group.

subliminal perception

A pattern in which people perceive and are in some ways influenced by inputs they did not consciously notice.

savant syndrome

A pattern of traits in a disabled person such that the person has some remarkable talent that contrasts with his or her very low level of general intelligence.

blind sight

A pattern resulting from brain damage, in which the person seems unable to see in part of his or her field of vision but can often correctly respond to visual inputs when required to do so by an experimenter.

Deduction

A process through which a person starts with claims, or general assertions, and asks what further claims necessarily follow from these premises. Often contrasted with induction.

reason-based choice

A proposal for how people make decisions. The central idea is that people make a choice when—and only when—they detect what they believe to be a persuasive reason for making that choice.

covariation

A relationship between two variables such that the presence (or magnitude) of one variable can be predicted from the presence (or magnitude) of the other. Covariation can be positive or negative. If it is positive, then increases in one variable occur when increases in the other occur. If it is negative, then decreases in one variable occur when increases in the other occur.

conditional statements

A statement of the format "If X then Y," with the first part (the "if" clause, or antecedent) providing a condition under which the second part (the "then" clause, or consequent) is guaranteed to be true.

factor analysis

A statistical method for studying the interrelations among various tests. The goal is to discover the extent to which the tests are influenced by the same factors.

invalid syllogisms

A syllogism (such as a categorical syllogism, or a syllogism built on a conditional statement) in which the conclusion is not logically demanded by the premises.

valid syllogisms

A syllogism for which the conclusion follows from the premise, in accord with the rules of logic.

belief perseverance

A tendency to continue endorsing some assertion or claim, even when the clearly available evidence completely undermines that claim.

risk aversion

A tendency toward avoiding risk. People tend to be risk averse when contemplating gains, choosing instead to hold tight to what they already have. Often contrasted with risk seeking.

risk seeking

A tendency toward seeking out risk. People tend to be risk seeking when contemplating losses, presumably because they are willing to gamble in hopes of avoiding (or diminishing) their losses. Often contrasted with risk aversion.

belief bias

A tendency, within logical reasoning, to endorse a conclusion if the conclusion happens to be something one believes is true anyhow. In displaying this tendency, people seem to ignore both the premises of the logical argument and logic itself, and they rely instead on their broader pattern of beliefs about what is true and what is not.

Flynn effect

A worldwide increase in IQ scores over the last several decades, occurring in both impoverished and developed nations, and proceeding at a rate of about 3 points per decade

test-retest reliability

An assessment of whether a test is consistent in what it measures from one occasion to another, determined by asking whether the test's results on one occasion are correlated with results from the same test (or a close variant on it) given at a later time.

predictive validity

An assessment of whether a test measures what it's intended to measure, based on whether the test score correlates with (i.e., can predict) some other relevant criterion.

action slips

An error in which a person performs some behavior or makes some response that is different from the behavior or response intended.

frequency estimate

An essential step in judgment, in which someone makes an assessment of how often he or she has experienced or encountered a particular object or event.

selection task

An experimental procedure, commonly used to study reasoning, in which a person is presented with four cards with certain information on either side of the card. The person is also given a rule that may describe the cards, and the person's task is to decide which cards must be turned over to find out if the rule describes the cards or not. Also called the four-card task.

dual-process model

Any model of thinking that claims people have two distinct means of making judgments—one of which is fast, efficient, but prone to error, and one that is slower, more effortful, but also more accurate.

A research study asked participants to estimate death rates for different causes. Participants estimated that about four times more people die by homicide than from asthma, but the truth is the reverse - approximately four times more people die from asthma than by homicide. Which heuristic might cause this very incorrect estimation?

Availability heuristic: homicides are reported in the news, so they are easier to recall than asthma deaths, which are rarely reported in the news. News reports (and crime shows) make homicide deaths easier to recall and this availability is taken as indicating their frequency.

What does the neuronal workspace suggest about brain activity when sleeping?

During sleep, the brain's activities are not coordinated.

neural correlates of consciousness

Events in the nervous system that occur at the same time as, and may be the biological basis of, a specific mental event or state