AP Psychology - Unit 0.1B Culture and Biases

Cultural Norms

• shared rules and guidelines within a community that dictate appropriate and acceptable behavior in society

Confirmation Bias

• the tendency to search for, interpret, and remember information that confirms ones preconceptions or point of view

• dismissing information that challenges one’s beliefs

• leads to polarized thinking

Cultural Expectations

• anticipated roles and behavior individuals are expected to fulfill based on cultural norms

Hindsight Bias

• “I-knew-it-all-along”

• tendency to believe, after learning an outcome, that one would have foreseen it 

• tendency to think that new information is less surprising once you know it

• our brains automatically draws connections between new information to previous knowledge 

Cultural Circumstances

• situations in which people find themselves in, often including socio-economic factors, historical events, and the person’s geographical location 

Overconfidence

• the tendency to overestimate one’s knowledge or one’s ability to perform a task successfully

• more confident than correct (quick over correct thinking)

• leads individuals to be unprepared

• people who avoid overconfidence and rather gathers facts and balances clashing arguments are called super forecasters 

Perceiving Order in Random Events

• the tendency to find patterns in random data

• people often view patterns or streaks unusual in random sequences, even if the probability of an outcomes remains the same 

• ex: repeating digits