Psychology 2720A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Illusory Correlation, Representativeness Heuristic, Availability Heuristic

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2720A/B
• Professor: Amanda De Vaul- Fetters

Document Summary

Social cognition: social cognition: the way people think about themselves and the social world. On automatic pilot: low effort thinking: schema: a cognitive structure that contains our knowledge about a person, object, or event. They provide expectancies about how members of the group will behave and guide our actions towards them. For the most part these are reasonable and lead to accurate assumptions. Also occurs when people overestimate the frequency with which two unlikely events co- occur. Controlled social cognition: high effort thinking: controlled thinking: thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary, and effortful. Counterfactual thinking: counterfactual thinking: thinking about how events might have turned out differently than they did. Counterfactual thoughts refer to alternative realities that do not actually exist: counterfactual thoughts can intensify emotional response to an event. If the event is positive, people feel better when they imagine how it might not have occurred.