AP Psychology - Thinking & Intelligence

Executive Functions

Cognitive processes that allow people to generate, organize, plan, and carry out goal directed behaviors and experience critical thinking

Concepts

Concepts (mental groupings) form the basis of thought

Prototypes

• Prototypes - ideal examples given for a concept

  • Ex: people more quickly agree that a crow is a bird compared to a penguin being a bird

Divergent

• Divergent - ability to come up with new, creative solutions, many possible solutions

  • Creativity promoted by this!

What hurts divergent thinking?

• Functional Fixedness hurts divergent thinking

  • Tendency to only think about the most common use of an item

  • Children are not as fixed because they don’t have as much knowledge

Convergent

• Convergent - solving a problem with a single, correct answer

  • Needed for tests (SAT or AP tests)

Algorithms

• A logical rule or step by step procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem

  • Ex: following a recipe to make yummy cookies!

Heuristics

• A rule of thumb strategy that often allows to make judgment and solve problems efficiently

• A short cut (that can be prone to errors)

Types of Heuristics (that often lead to errors)

• Representative heuristic - a rule of thumb for judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they match our prototype

  • Can cause us to ignore important information

  • Ex: Joe is a politician, therefore he is corrupt

• Availability Heuristic - Estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in our memory

  • Ex: Plane Crashes- you are more likely to die in a car crash than a plane crash, but people think planes are more dangerous because every time there is a plane crash it gets a lot of media coverage

  • If it comes to mind easily (maybe a vivid event) we presume it is common

• Confirmation bias - A tendency to search for information that confirms one’s preconceptions

  • Ex: we seek out news stories that sway with our political beliefs

  • Ex: if you believe that during a full moon there is an increase in admissions to the emergency room where you work, you will take notice of admissions during a full moon, but be inattentive to the moon when admissions occur during other nights of the month

• Hindsight Bias

  • Tendency, after learning about an event, to believe that one could have predicted the event in advance

  • Ex: we should have seen a big pandemic like covid coming

• Mental Set

  • A tendency to approach a problem in a particular way, especially if it has worked in the past

  • May or may not be a good thing

  • Ex: a physician might see a new patient with symptoms similar to certain cases they have seen in the past, so they might diagnose this new patient with the same illness

• Framing

  • The way things are presented changes the way we think about them

  • Ex: How Should the United States prepare for the outbreak of an unusual disease that could kill 600 people? Participants strongly preferred solutions framed as gains (“200 people will be saved”) rather than losses (“400 people will die”)

  • Ex: more people save for retirement if you have to “opt out” instead of “opt-in” to a program

• Gambler’s Fallacy

  • When someone believes that a certain random event is less likely or more likely to happen caused on the outcome of a previous or series of events

  • Ex: a coin just landed on heads twice in a row, then it's “due” to land on tails on the next toss

  • Ex: If you’ve been accepted into seven out of seven colleges so far, then you decide you’re probably going to be accepted into the eight as well

• ‘Sunk Cost Fallacy

  • You feel as if you should continue pouring money, time, or effort into a situation since you’ve already sunk so much into it

  • Ex: 30 minutes into a movie you realize you don’t like it, but you continue watching anyway

Measuring Intelligence

• Throughout history, consensus about how to define and measure intelligence continues to be debated and is subject to bias

• Classic psychological tests used to measure individual differences compared to other people

Types of Intelligence

• Fluid Intelligence - think abstractly and speedily

  • Tends to decrease with age, especially during late adulthood

• Crystalized Intelligence - our accumulated and verbal skills

  • Tends to increase with age

One Ability or Many Debate

• Spearman in early 1900s proposed General Intelligence factor (g) also underlies various abilities

  • Noticed that people who score high in one factor (ex: verbal), typically score high in others (ex: spatial), so there must be a common factor (“g”)

• Gardner argued we don’t have an intelligence but multiple intelligences, each relatively independent of one another

  • (Linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalist)

Intelligence Quotient (IQ)

• Early intelligence tests in 1900s invented Intelligence Quotient (IQ)

• Mental Age/Chronological Age x 100 = IQ

• Allows for comparison between ages

• Term is still used now, but IQ not actually calculated like this

• Today, IQ scores are used to identify students into educational services

What do psychological tests need to be?

Reliable and valid

Reliability

• Test is reliable when it gives the same results each time it is given

  • Ex: person taking same test at two different times should score about the same

• Reliability can be tested by:

  • split-half= give someone all even questions one time, then all odd questions and they should score the same both tests

  • Test-retest= give someone the same test twice

Validity

• Test is valid when it measures what it was designed to measure

  • Ex: Boylan freshman entrance exam measures your factual knowledge on specific subjects and places you in a track according to your results

• Predictive Validity - test can effectively predict how well you will do on related topic in future

  • Ex: career tests/surveys

• Construct Validity - test can demonstrate link between score and trait is is supposed to measure

  • Ex: intelligence tests, Big 5 personality tests

Biases

• IQ scores tend to vary more within a group than between groups

• Personal and sociocultural biases can impact interpretation of individual IQ scores

• Poverty, discrimination, and educational inequalities can negatively influence intelligence scores of individuals and whole groups

• Scores from intelligence tests have been used to limit access to jobs, military ranks, educational institutions, and immigration to the US

Flynn Effect

The observation that average IQ scores have risen steadily from one generation to the next over the past century

Stereotype threat

The psychological pressure or anxiety people feel when they risk confirming a negative stereotype about their social group

Stereotype lift

A performance boost that people can experience when they are aware that an outgroup is targets of a negative stereotype