PSYS 001 - EXAM 1 - 7.19.3 - Heuristic Processing: Availability and Representativeness
threat to accuracy of Overconfidence
Eyewitnesses may be very confident that they have accurately identified a suspect, even though their memories are incorrect.
threat to accuracy of Misinformation effect
Eyewitnesses who are questioned by the police may change their memories of what they observed at the crime scene due to the questions themselves.
people who watch a lot of violent television view the world as more dangerous, probably because violence becomes more ??? for them.
cognitively accessible
The term that most people use to refer to a whole range of unusual aspects of human perception and cognition is the
paranormal
threat to accuracy of source monitoring:
Uncertainty about the source of a memory may lead to mistaken judgments.
the representativeness heuristic is when we
base our judgments on information that seems to represent, or match, what we expect will happen, while ignoring other potentially more relevant statistical information.
heuristics are in contrast to
algorithms
threat to accuracy of Counterfactual thinking
people may feel bad about events that "might not have occurred if only a small change had occurred before them."
Probability is defined as
the likelihood of something happening
threat to accuracy of Confirmation bias
Once people's beliefs become established, they become self-perpetuating and difficult to change.
threat to accuracy of Selective memory
People generally remember exciting, dramatic, or unusual events and forget everyday ones.
threat to accuracy of Salience
People may base judgments on a single event that catches their attention due while they ignore hundreds of other equally informative events that they do not see.
threat to accuracy of Representativeness heuristic
People may have incorrect expectations. For example, after a coin has come up "heads" many times in a row, people frequently erroneously think that the next flip is more likely to be "tails" (the gambler's fallacy).
threat to accuracy of Availability heuristic
People may overestimate the crime statistics in their own area, because these crimes are so easy to recall.
threat to accuracy of Cognitive accessibility
People may think that they contributed more to a project than they really did because it is so easy to remember their own contributions.
threat to accuracy of Functional fixedness
People's creativity may be impaired by the overuse of traditional thinking, particularly when thinking of alternate uses for various objects.
Parapsychologists, scientists that study anomalous phenomena like ESP, generally use the term
Psi
??? and ??? color how we perceive our social worlds.
Salience and accessibility
threat to accuracy of Belief in the paranormal (Psi)
Some people believe in the existence of paranormal phenomena, like ghosts or psychokinesis.
the availability heuristic is
The tendency to make judgments of the frequency or likelihood that an event occurs on the basis of the ease with which it can be retrieved from memory
counterfactual thinking is
The tendency to think about and experience events according to "what might have been"
Psi-gamma refers to
anomalous information transfer, like ESP, clairvoyance, and remote viewing.
psi-kappa refers to
anomalous transfer of matter or energy, such as psychokinesis or telekinesis
heuristics are
information-processing strategies that are useful in many cases but may lead to errors when misapplied.
does previous history of events affect future events in probability?
no
the gambler's fallacy is when
people who see a flipped coin come up "heads" five times in a row will frequently predict, and perhaps even wager money, that "tails" will be next.
algorithms are
recipe-style information-processing strategies that guarantee a correct answer at all times.
counterfactual thinking means that If we can easily imagine an outcome that is better than what actually happened, then we may feel
sadness and disappointment
People may also take more care to prepare for unlikely events than for more likely ones, because the unlikely ones are more
salient
another way of thinking of heuristics is that they are
shortcuts
Probability is calculated
solely by dividing the total number of potential favorable outcomes by the total number of possible outcomes