PSYC 1030H Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Availability Heuristic, Representativeness Heuristic, Gestalt Psychology

• School: Trent University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 1030H
• Professor: James Parker

Document Summary

Reasoning: cognitive activity that transforms information to reach specific conclusions. Decision making: process of choosing among different courses of actions or alternatives, rational decision making is making decisions in cool, mathematical way, considerations include utility or value to you of each alternative and the probability of results occurring. Informal decision making is more common (everyday) process. It relies on hunches, intuition, information from memories and opinions from others. Role of mood states: current moods (especially strong moods) can dramatically reduce ability to reason effectively. Sources of error: heuristics: gestalt psychology is where we automatically impose visual organization on stimuli, three main gestalt principles are, 1. Confirmation bias: everyone can sometimes become locked into flawed conclusions, bias prevent us from even considering information that might call our conclusions into question, evidence consistent with present views noticed, encoded, processed, remembered . Present views maintained, strengthened: evidence not consistent with present views not noticed, encoded, processed or remembered.