apsych c8--thinking and creativity

we each have cognitive rules/concepts we apply to stimuli from our environment that helps us think about what we are seeing

• sometimes we base our concepts on prototypes of what we think a good example would look like

images can be visual, auditory, taste (thinking about what water tastes like)

we can study how thought works by looking at the two ways we problem solve:

• algorithms: trying every possible solution until we find the answer (checking every JSB photo until i find one of myself)

• heuristics: a “rule of thumb,” like guessing a five-letter password by plugging in actual words because that is what we assume will work

  • availability heuristic: judging a situation based on similar situations that we think of, like believing ursuline is the best school in town simply because i have gone to UA and nowhere else

  • representativeness heuristic: judging a situation based on how similar the aspects are to prototypes the person holds in his or her mind, like seeing someone tall and thinking they may play a sport when you don’t even know them

  • we are often overconfident as humans and tend to believe ourselves even when we have been proved wrong

  • gambler’s fallacy: this occurs when a certain event is more or less likely to occur because of how often it has recently occured

    • i will not get more cooking fever diamonds in the casino just because i’ve spent more money already

  • sunk-cost fallacy: the unwillingness to change our strategy even when it is clearly not working

impediments to problem-solving

• mental set/rigidity is our tendency to fall into established thought patterns to that we do not see new solutions

  • functional fixedness—not seeing a new use for an object, like if i use my water bottle to hold trash

• framing is the idea that depending on how something is presented to us, we may see it differently than another form of presentation

everyone has different levels of creativity, although divergent thinking (looking for multiple solutions) is often more associated with creativity than convergent thinking (stubborn one solution)