AP Psychology Unit 2B: Thinking, Problem-Solving, Judgements, and Decision Making

1. Concept: mental groups of similar objects, events, ideas, or people. 2. Prototypes: the best example of a concept. 3. Schemas: Concepts or mental frameworks that organize and interpret information. 4. Assimilation: interpreting our new experience in terms of our existing schemas; for example, a child seeing a dog for the first time might describe it as a big cat or a cat that barks. 5. Accommodation: adapting our current understandings (schemas) to incorporate new information; for example, a child seeing a dog for the first time might adjust their thinking to consider there are different types of four-legged animals. 6. Algorithms: A problem-solving strategy that attempts all possible solutions until the correct one is found. 7. Heuristics: Addressing problems by using mental shortcuts to make judgements. 8. Representative heuristic: When decisions are made according to prior experiences or stereotypes. 9. Availability heuristic: When decisions are made by recalling the first or most vivid example that comes to mind. We tend to overestimate the likelihood of something when we can easily call examples to mind. 10. Mental set: A tendency to only see solutions that have worked in the past. 11. Priming: The idea that exposure to one stimulus may influence a response to a subsequent stimulus, without conscious guidance or intention. 12. Framing: Different ways of presenting the same information often evoke different emotions. For example, labeling a product 90% fat free is often viewed as more appealing than labeling it as 10% fat. 13. Gambler's fallacy: the belief that the odds of a chance event increase if the event hasn't occurred recently. 14. Sunk-cost fallacy: people make decisions about a current situation based on what they have previously invested in the situation. 15. Executive functions: The mental processes that allow individuals to generate, organize, plan, and carry out goal-directed behaviors and experience critical thinking. 16. Creativity: It's characteristics include: -Expertise -Imaginative thinking skills -Venturesome personality -Intrinsic motivation -A creative environment 17. Divergent thinking: expands the number of possible problem solutions. 18. Convergent thinking: narrows the available problem solutions to determine the single best solution. 19. Functional fixedness: A cognitive bias that limits a person to use an object only in the way it is traditionally used. It can hinder problem solving. 20. Critical thinking: Critical thinking is objective and requires you to analyze and evaluate information to form a sound judgement.