Chapter 8 Flashcards
Cognitive economy
The economics of what is in peoples minds
Characterized by the use of data
Heuristics
Simple, effective rules, either learned or gained by evolution
Bias
Prejudice in favour of or against one thing, person, or group compared to another, usually in a way to be considered unfair
Representative heuristic
Mental shortcut that we use when making judgements about probability
Base rates
Frequency or likelihood of an event occurring without intervention
Base rate neglect
A cognitive error whereby too little weight is placed on the base or original rate of a probability
Availability heuristic
Occurs when we judge events likelihood on how easily we recall similar events
Hindsight bias
Psychological phenomenon that allows people to convince themselves after an event they accurately predicted it before it happened
Conformation bias
Tendency to search for, interpret, favour, and recall information in a way that supports ones prior belelfs
Bandwagon effect
The tendency of people to adopt certain behaviours, styles, or attitudes simply because everyone else is doing them
Top-down processing
Perceiving things based on your prior experiences and knowledge
Bottom-up processing
When the brain processes sensory information and uses clues to understand stimuli
Concepts
Verbal or written understanding of abstract thought
Schemas
Describes patterns of thinking and behaviour that people use to interpret the world
System one thinking
Near instantaneous process that happens automatically, intuitively, and with little effort
System two thinking
Slower and requires more effort
Algorithms
Step-by-step procedure is that provide the correct answer to a particular problem
Obstacles to problem solving
Mental sets, functional fixedness, unnecessary, constrains, and irrelevant information
The salience of surface similarities
Refers to how attention grabbing something is
Mental sets
The brains tendency to stick with the most familiar solution to a problem, and ignore alternatives
Functional fixedness
Bias that limits, a persons, ability to use an object in more ways than it is traditionally used
Language
Principal method of human communication, consisting of words, used in a structured and conventional way, and conveyed by speech, writing, and gestures
Generativity in language
The ability to produce sentences never before said, and I understand sentences never before heard
Arbitrary in language
language consists of speech sounds based on the social agreement or convention
