Chapter 8.1

Question 1

Thinking

Answer 1

Any mental activity or processing of information. It includes learning, remembering, perceiving, communicating, believing, and deciding

Question 2

Cognitive misers

Answer 2

invests as little mental energy as possible unless it’s necessary to do more

Question 3

Cognitive economy

Answer 3

allows us to simplify what we attend to and keep the information we need for decision making to a manageable minimum

Question 4

Thin slicing

Answer 4

our ability to extract useful information from small bits of behaviour

Question 5

Cognitive bias

Answer 5

systematic error in thinking

Question 6

Representativeness heuristic

Answer 6

involves judging the probability of an event based on how prevalent that event has been in past experience

Question 7

Base rate

Answer 7

how common a behaviour or characteristic is in general

Question 8

Availability heuristic

Answer 8

we estimate the likelihood of an occurrence based on how easily it comes to our minds - on how “available” it is in our memories

Question 9

Hindsight bias

Answer 9

sometimes also known as the “I knew it all along” effect, refers to our tendency to overestimate how accurately we could have predicted something happening once we know the outcome

Question 10

Top-down processing

Answer 10

we fill in the gaps of missing information using our experience and background knowledge

Question 11

Concepts

Answer 11

our knowledge and ideas about objects, actions, and characteristics that share core properties

Question 12

Schemas

Answer 12

concepts we’ve stored in memory about how certain actions, objects, and ideas relate to each other. They help us mentally organize events that share core features, say, going to a restaurant, cleaning the house, or visiting the zoo. As we acquire knowledge, we create schemas that enable us to know roughly what to expect in a given situation and to draw on our knowledge when we encounter something new.

Question 13

Linguistic determinism

Answer 13

view that all thought is represented verbally and that as a result, our language defines our thinking, it provides an extreme version of top-down processing in which no ideas can be generated without linguistic knowledge.

Question 14

Linguistic relativity

Answer 14

view that characteristics of language shape our thought process. Proponents of this view maintain that characteristics of language shape our thought processes

Question 15

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

Answer 15

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis posits that language either determines or influences one’s thought. In other words, people who speak different languages see the world differently, based on the language they use to describe it.