Social Psych: Judgement and Decision Making

Ch. 2

Schemata

a schema is a cognitive framework or concept that helps organize and interpret information

The main types of schemas:

objects, the self, roles, and events

Example of a schema

when a child is young they may develop a schema for a dog (they know a dog walks on four legs, is hairy and is tall). When the child goes to the zoo and sees a tiger for the first time they may also think that the tiger is a dog

Types of Mental Shortcuts

Heuristics, Biases, Fallacies

Availability Heuristic

a mental shortcut allowing people to make decisions based on emotional cues, familiar faces, and vivid images that leave an easily recalled impression of our minds A

Availability Heuristic Example

when a plane crashes and it makes people afraid of flying - plane crashes are so emotionally impactful and are normally big in the news making us feel like they’re more common than there are whereas in reality, car accidents are far more common and plane crashes are much more likely

Representativeness Heuristic

a mental shortcut which assesses the likelihood of things, by assessing how similar it is to an existing prototype

Representativeness Heuristic Example

police looking for a suspect might focus disproportionately on a certain race (as this is the prototype in their brain for what a criminal looks like)

Confirmation Bias

looking for information that is consistent with our existing beliefs

Confirmation Bias Example

conducting a study and the results are conflicting so you turn your attention towards results that support your theory

Anchoring and Adjustment

a heuristic where a person starts with an initial idea and adjusts their beliefs from said point (comparing and adjusting from a reference point)

Social Comparison Bias

a tendency to have feelings of dislike and competitiveness with someone seen as physically, socially, or mentally better than oneself in a self-relevant domain; this feeling often leads to rejecting that person from entering one’s own circle

Example of social comparison bias

the queen bee effect

Halo Effect

tendency for biased judgements and transfer of feelings of one attribute to another, unrelated attribute

Halo Effect Example

believing that a co-worker who dresses fancy is smarter than someone who dresses casually

Negativity Bias

notion that even when of equal intensity, things of more negative nature has a greater effect on one’s psychological state and processes than neutral or positive things

Negativity Bias Example

in relationships for very four positive interactions or positive dates can be negated by one negative interaction or one fight

Loss Aversion

we dislike losing more than we like winning (ie. winning 10 dollars vs. losing 10 dollars)

Framing Effect

when an individual choice from a set of options is influenced more by the presentation than the substance of the pertinent information (ie. glass half full vs. glass half empty)

The paradox of choice

refers to the idea that the more choices a person has to choose from, the more stress and difficulty they will encounter when it comes to decision making, ultimately leading to the feeling of unhappiness

Gambler’s Fallacy

perception of future outcome probability wrongly influenced by past series of outcome

Hot Hand Effect

the belief that a person who succeeded in an activity will likely succeed again in further attempts - an individual’s success in the past correlates and dictates their successes in the future

Survivorship Bias

a type of sample selection bias that occurs when an individual mistakes a visible successful subgroup as the entire group

Survivorship Bias example

Steve Job’s dropped out of college and became a millionaire so that means I should drop out of college too

Base-Rate Fallacy

a cognitive bias leading people to make inconsistent and illogical decisions - it occurs when individuals overweigh or ignore information about the probability of an event occurring in favor of information that is irrelevant to the outcome

Base Rate Fallacy Example

the idea that most car accidents happen within 2 miles of their homes: insurance companies urge people to be more careful driving near home however its really an issue of the base rate as we drive around our homes the most often

Hindsight Bias

the tendency upon learning new information to believe and claim you knew the information all along

Functional Fixedness

a cognitive bias that enables us to perceive an object only in terms of its most common use - it creates the inability to recognize alternative approaches which limits ideas and problem solving

Primacy Bias

an individuals tendency to remember the first things in a list

Recency Bias

the bias of memory that makes people favor the more recent events over older ones

Sunk Cost Fallacy

the tendency for people to keep investing resources into something, even if the current cost outweighs the benefits (ie. sitting through a movie you don’t like to “get your money’s worth”)

Planning Fallacy

a phenomenon in which individuals underestimate the time it will take to complete a task

Mere Exposure Effect

when people tend to develop a preference for certain things, objects, etc. simply because they’re familiar with them (ie. spending more time with the same person increases positive feelings about the other person)

Endowment Effects

a bias explaining how individual’s place a higher value on objects they own in comparison to objects they do not own

Bias Blind Spot

a cognitive bias wherein people assume they’re less prone to cognitive biases than other people