PSYC 333 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Social Neuroscience, Risk Assessment, Rationality
9 Jun 2016
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Document Summary
A comment on human genetics and social neuroscience. Close contact with reality/accurate perceptions of reality . The perception of reality is called mentally healthy when what the individual perceives corresponds to what is actually there (johoda, 1958) In fact people actually make a number of systematic errors when gatheting and processing information and making judgements: Heuristics: the more noticeable events are the more often we think they occur (ie plane crashes) Biases: people show biases when processing information about everyday experiences and other people. Illusions & well-being (taylor & brown, 1988) Most people have illusions about the self. Risk assessment (tend to underestimate their susceptibility to risks), overly optimistic. Positive traits are overwhelmingly more descriptive of the self than negative traits. Positive information about the self is processed more efficiently and recalled better than negative self information and failures. Show self-serving bias when making causal attributions (ascribe our successes to ourselves, and our failures to the situations)
