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