PSYC390 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Base Rate Fallacy, Availability Heuristic, Representativeness Heuristic

• School: University of Delaware
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC390
• Professor: Chad Forbes

Document Summary

We are often lazy thinkers and tend to take shortcuts whenever they can. We do(cid:374)"t always reason accurately, but we often do so in an efficient manner. Heuristics are time-saving mental shortcuts that reduce complex judgments to simple rules. People often use heuristics to make causal inferences: bias toward disposition when observing others, bias toward situation when observing self, bias toward enhancing the self. The tendency to judge the category membership of things based on how closely they match the (cid:862)typi(cid:272)al(cid:863) or (cid:862)a(cid:448)erage(cid:863) (cid:373)e(cid:373)(cid:271)er of that (cid:272)ategory. Representative heuristic is an inductive and bottom-up process while stereotype is a deductive and top-down process. The tendency to judge the frequency or probability of an event in terms of how easy it is to think of examples for that event. A tendency to be biased toward the starting value or anchor in making quantitative judgments. Anchoring and adjusting occurs even when the anchor is completely arbitrary or absurd.