W2 Social Cognition

Representative heuristics

Judging based on how much something resembles a typical case or category, often ignoring base rates

Availability heuristics

Judging the frequency of an event based on how easily examples come to mind, which can lead to overestimating rare event

Anchoring and Adjustment heuristics

Tendency to use several values as a starting point, & adjustments are made thereafter.

Mental schemas

Mental framework that helps organize information.

Attention (notice info), Encoding (store info), and Retrieval (recall info)

Processes of mental schemas

Perseverance effect

Tendency of beliefs & schemas to remain unchanged, even with contradictory information

Self-fulfilling

When expectations influence interactions, leading others to act in ways that confirm those expectations

Priming

Events increase availability in memory

Autonomic processing

Effortless, autonomic, non-conscious

Happened in amygdala

Controlled processing

Logical, systematic & effortful

Happened in prefrontal cortex

Optimistic Bias

Predisposition to expect things to turn out well overall.

Overconfidence Bias

Tendency to be more confident in accuracy of own judgments than is reasonable.

Planning Fallacy

Tendency to make optimistic predictions on how long a given task will take for completion.

Counterfactual thinking

Tendency to imagine other outcomes than actual ones that occurred.

Magical thinking

Involves assumptions that don’t hold up to rational scrutiny.