Week 3 Readings

Question 1

Availability heuristic

Answer 1

The tendency to estimate the likelihood that an event will occur by how easily instances of it come to mind.

Question 2

False-consensus effect

Answer 2

The tendency for people to overestimate the extent to which others share their opinions, attributes and behaviours.

Question 3

Base-rate fallacy

Answer 3

The finding that people are relatively insensitive to consensus information presented in the form of numerical base rates.

Question 4

Counterfactual thinking

Answer 4

The tendency to imagine alternative events or outcomes that might have occurred but did not.

Question 5

Fundamental attributes

Answer 5

The tendency to focus on the role of personal causes and underestimate the impact of situations on other people’s behaviour.

Question 6

Priming

Answer 6

The tendency for recently used or perceived words or ideas to come to mind easily influences the interpretation of new information.

Question 7

Implicit personality theory

Answer 7

A network of assumptions people make about the relationships among traits and behaviours.

Question 8

Primary effect

Answer 8

The tendency for information presented early in a sequence to have more impact on impressions than information presented later.

Question 9

Information integration theory

Answer 9

The theory that impressions are based on (1) personal dispositions and the current state of the perceiver and (2) a weighted average of a target person’s characteristics.

Question 10

Attribution theory

Answer 10

A group of theories that describe how people explain the causes of behaviour.

Question 11

Need for closure

Answer 11

The desire to reduce cognitive uncertainty, which heightens the importance of first impressions.