PSYC 2103 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Confirmation Bias, Belief Perseverance, Illusory Correlation
Document Summary
Biases are often useful and can help us access information very quickly, but sometimes biases can be taken too far. Errors and biases can enhance our sense of self control. Self-efficacy: believing that you can achieve something you set out to do, we tend to feel a lot of control over our lives when we have high self-efficacy. Illusion of control: we act like we have control over things that are objectively out of our control aka gamblers fallacy. The overconfidence phenomenon: we are more confident in our beliefs than we ought to be. People tend to recalibrate their confidence level if given prompt and consistent feedback that lets them know whether they got something right or wrong. Belief in a just world: we like to think the world is a fair place good things should happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. Errors and biases can enhance our sense of rationality.
