Intro to Psychology Module 19 - Accuracy and Inaccuracy

counterfactual thinking.

The tendency to think about and experience events according to "what might have been"

Cognitive biases

errors in memory or judgment that are caused by the inappropriate use of cognitive processes.

misinformation effect

errors in memory that occur when new information influences existing memories.

Probability

the likelihood of something happening

overconfidence,

the tendency for people to be too certain about their ability to accurately remember events and to make judgments.

confirmation bias

the tendency to verify and confirm our existing memories rather than to challenge and disconfirm them.

salient

they attract our attention

Psi-gamma

those phenomena that involve anomalous information transfer, like ESP, clairvoyance, and remote viewing.

availability heuristic

.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

Assimilation

According to Piaget, the process by which new ideas and experiences are absorbed and incorporated into existing mental structures and behaviors

flashbulb memory

a vivid and emotional memory of an unusual event that people believe they remember very well

sleeper effect

an attitude change that occurs over time when we forget the source of information

heuristics

information-processing strategies that are useful in many cases but may lead to errors when misapplied.

Accommodation

involves altering one's existing schemas, or ideas, due to new information and experiences. New schemas are also sometimes created.

Schemata

mental representations of the world that are formed and adjusted using the processes of assimilation and accommodation as a person experiences life.

A policeman convinces a man that he remembers killing his own sister because the policeman has a knife with the man's fingerprints on it.

misinformation effect

In the experiment described in the misinformation section, when the verb was changed from contacted to hit to smashed, __________________________.

participants estimated the speed of the vehicle involved in the crash to be higher for each verb change.

gambler's fallacy

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.

cognitive accessibility

people's first person perspective leads them to overestimate the degree to which they played a role in an event or project,

Functional fixedness

people's schemas prevent them from using an object in new and nontraditional ways.

algorithms

recipe-style information-processing strategies that guarantee a correct answer at all times.

Alice is athletic and is just over six feet tall. Most people think she is a basketball player. This is an example of _____________.

representative heuristic

Source monitoring

the ability to accurately identify the source of a memory.

psi-kappa

those phenomena that involve anomalous transfer of matter, such as psychokinesis or telekinesis (the ability to move things with one's mind), or even anomalous transfer of energy, such as pyrokinsesis (the ability to set things aflame with one's mind).

representativeness heuristic

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.