PSYC 2100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Availability Heuristic, Illusory Correlation, Regression Fallacy
19 Dec 2017
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Document Summary
Effective action requires sound judgement about the world around us. The field of social cognition is the study of how people think about the social world and arrive at judgements that help them interpret the past, understand the present, and predict the future. Mistakes are informative to psychologists because they provide particularly helpful clues about how people think about others and make influences about them. Researchers interested in social cognition have often explored the limitations of everyday judgement. Understanding other people depends on accurate information, because social cognition depends on information. A lack of sufficient information on which to base a judgment rarely stops people from making inferences about a person or situation. A great deal of what we conclude about people based on their faces is determined almost instantaneously. Research indicates that judgement based on thin slices of behaviour have a certain sort of validity.
