PSY 2110 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Availability Heuristic, Fundamental Attribution Error, Representativeness Heuristic

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 2110
• Professor: Marie- Lyne Laliberte

Document Summary

How we understand and make sense of our social world. Humans are cognitively lazy and use many short cut to process information. Based on what we pay attention to it will have an impact on our cognitive process. People with the same information will interpret it differently. Conserve mental effort: we use shortcuts - we don"t like to change our world view. Most of us do(cid:374)"t st(cid:396)i(cid:448)e to u(cid:374)de(cid:396)sta(cid:374)d the (cid:449)o(cid:396)ld pe(cid:396)fe(cid:272)tly. When we try to explain a persons behaviour. We want to be able to predict other peoples behaviour. We do(cid:374)"t al(cid:449)ays (cid:373)ake att(cid:396)i(cid:271)utio(cid:374)s. they (cid:396)e(cid:395)ui(cid:396)e (cid:373)o(cid:396)e effo(cid:396)t (cid:271)e(cid:272)ause (cid:449)e (cid:374)eed to a(cid:374)alyse the situatio(cid:374). Some people enjoy the attributional process other people aren"t as interested in understanding. When we are faced with a certain unexpected. Some people have a high need to control their environment and thus make more attributions: need for control. Some people enjoy thinking and want to understand attributions: need for cognition.