AP PSYCH 5.8 Biases and Errors in Thinking

• The ways we are wrong fall into common, easily identifiable categories
• These are heuristics and cognitive biases
• Remember that heuristics are thinking short cuts
  • They can lead us into the wrong answer sometimes
  • They aren’t always bad, in fact, they often work and are useful
  • A heuristic is like a process that leads us to a cognitive bias
• A cognitive bias is the result of using an imperfect thinking strategy
  • These results can then be used to create even more wrong answers
  • There are many, many cognitive biases

Examples

• The difference between heuristics and biases can be pretty abstract
• Can you determine if any given thought is the result or cause of another thought? Probably not.
  • Luckily, the AP Exam does not expect you to be able to differentiate between the two
• What we know is concrete is examples and explanations, but not definitions
  • Repeating a definition is not enough for AP standards

Heuristic

Representativeness Heuristic

• Thinking that a new thing has a few characteristics of a schema, and so it will fit into that schema
• Forcing something to fit into a box that it may not actually belong in, but initially looked right

Availability Heuristic

• When a thought is already right at the forefront of the mind, it is easy to just reference that, and not elaborate further
• It’s easier to think of chores you’ve done around the house, so it may feel like you are doing more work than others

Anchoring Bias

• A powerful or emotional thought weighs down the reat of the mind

Confirmation Bias

• Looking for proof of an preconceived notion and ignoring proof that disputes that idea

Hindsight Bias

• Believing, after the answer has been revealed, that you knew it all along

Bias

Fixedness

• Not being able to see a problem from another point of view

Framing Effect

• Being influenced by how something is contextualized
• Some ways of phrasing things can come off differently, despite the literal meaning being the same

Illusory Correlation

• Things happening at the same time or near each other, but not actually being connected

Functional Fixedness

• Not being able to see that a physical object has multiple uses

Belief Perseverance

• Even when presented with convincing evidence to the contrary, people tend to hold on to wrong beliefs

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