PSYC 100A Chapter Notes - Chapter 9: Availability Heuristic, Belief Perseverance, Smart People

• School: University of Victoria
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 100A
• Professor: Martin Sherer Smith

Document Summary

Cognition: all of the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering & communication. Concept: mental grouping of similar events, objects, ideas & people: used to simplify our thinking, can be measured in humans as well as other animals. Prototype: a mental image/best example of a category: can be misleading. Con rmation bias: tendency to search for info that supports our perception & to ignore/distort contradictory evidence. Fixation: the inability to see a problem from a fresh perspective. Mental set: tendency to approach problems with the mind-set that worked for us in the past: predisposes how we think. Impose constraints: tendency to assume that there are extra constraints on a task. Newman, garry, bernstein, kantner & lindsay - determined that when given a statement & asked whether or not it"s true of false, people are more likely to say true if it is accompanied by a picture.